Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Modelling the Occupant Behaviour
Impact on Buildings Energy Prediction
João Virote and Rui Neves-Silva
Abstract Building retrofitting projects represent great opportunities to include
new energy efficient technologies, already available on the market. However, for
many of these technologies, the occupants' behaviour within the building can
weaken the expected return on investment. This is special true in intelligent
technologies that try to compensate the lack of user awareness of energy con-
sumption problems. This chapter describes a model for occupant behaviour within
the building in relation to energy consumption, along with a building energy
consumption model (ECM) is proposed based on stochastic Markov models. The
ECM is used to predict possible energy saving gains from building retrofitting
projects. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed ECM learns occupant
behavioural patterns from the building. Additionally, it reliably reproduces them,
predicts the building energy consumption and identifies potential areas of energy
waste. The ultimate objective of the proposed models is the integration in Decision
Support Tools to advise the investor on the selection of technologies and evaluate
the merits of the investment.
1 Introduction
This chapter is derived after the results first presented by Virote et al. (Virote and
Neves-Silva
2012
).
According to Hoes et al. (
2009
), 'Energy use in buildings is closely linked to
their operational and space utilisation characteristics and the behaviour of their
occupants'. User behaviour and lifestyle choices are closely linked to the use of
