Overview
Occupant behaviour, which is a key issue for building design optimization, energy diagnosis, performance evaluation, and building energy simulation, contributes significantly to the building energy consumption, while the cognition of influences of occupant behaviour is quite insufficient both in building systems design and energy retrofit nowadays, leading to limited understanding and inappropriate over-simplification. Existing studies on occupant behaviour, mainly from the perspective of sociology, lack in-depth quantitative analysis.
Although there are many group worldwide studying occupant behaviour individually, to date the behaviour models created so far have often been inconsistent, with a lack of consensus in common language, in good experimental design and in modelling methodologies. Due to the complexity and the great discrepancies in behaviour often encountered, it is prerequisite for researchers to work together to define and simulate occupant behaviour in a consistent and common way. International cooperation is extremely important for both knowledge discovery and data sharing. The target of the project is to set up a standard occupant behaviour definition platform, establish a quantitative simulation methodology to model behaviour in buildings, and understand the influence of behaviour on building energy use and the indoor environment.
How to develop quantitatively describe the influence of occupant behaviour on building performance and how to analyze and evaluate the impact of occupant behaviour in buildings are fundamental scientific questions. Answering these questions is the main focus of this project. The objectives are to:
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identify quantitative descriptions and classifications of occupant behaviour,
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develop effective calculation methodologies of occupant behaviour,
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implement occupant behaviour models with building energy simulation tools,
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demonstrate the occupant behaviour models in design, evaluation and operation and optimization by case studies.
Participants
Canada, R. China, Denmark, Italy, Norway, Republic of Korea, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, United Kingdom, USA