Modelling occupant behaviour for urban scale simulation: Review of available approaches and tools: Fid-Bau Portal

Modelling occupant behaviour for urban scale simulation: Review of available approaches and tools

Doma, Aya / Ouf, Mohamed

Urban building energy modelling (UBEM) is considered one of the high-performance computational tools that enable analyzing energy use and the corresponding emission of different building sectors at large scales. However, the efficiency of these models relies on their capability to estimate more realistic building performance indicators at different temporal and spatial scales. The uncertainty of modelling occupants’ behaviours (OB) aspects is one of the main reasons for the discrepancy between the UBEM predicted results and the building’s actual performance. As a result, research efforts focused on improving the approaches to model OB at an urban scale considering different diversity factors. On the other hand, the impact of occupants in the current practice is still considered through fixed schedules and behaviours pattern. To bridge the gap between academic efforts and practice, the applicability of OB models to be integrated into the available UBEM tools needs to be analyzed. To this end, this paper aims to investigate the flexibility and extensibility of existing UBEM tools to model OB with different approaches by (1) reviewing UBEM’s current workflow and the main characteristics of its inputs, (2) reviewing the existing OB models and identifying their main characteristics and level of details that can contribute to UBEM accuracy, (3) providing a breakdown of the occupant-related features in the commonly used tools. The results of this investigation are relevant to researchers and tool developers to identify areas for improvements, as well as urban energy modellers to understand the different approaches to model OB in available tools.