Modelling method for air-conditioning usage behavior in multi-occupant office space based on group decision-making strategy

Abstract

Occupant behavior largely influence the energy use within buildings. In the multi-occupant office, occupant behavior is affected by individual preference as well as the interaction among occupants, and yet no suitable model is available to precisely reflect the behavior characteristics. This paper proposed and introduced a method for innovative multi-occupant air-conditioning (AC) usage behavior modelling in a multi-occupant office, which used intuitionistic fuzzy preference relationship to describe individual behavior intention and a hierarchical structure to reflect the social relationship among multiple occupants through subjective evaluation method. The group decision-making process combined the individual behavior intention and the weights of occupants using the analytic hierarchy process. Then, the AC usage behavior of a multi-occupant office was simulated by integrating the multi-occupant model into designer's simulation toolkit (DeST) building performance simulation software. The results of conducted analysis of a single office with multi-occupant showed that the proposed multi-occupant modelling method could quantitatively characterize the group relationships and AC usage behavior patterns. The absolute errors for the total AC operation time and frequency of the start-up periods of AC between the simulation and measurement results were only 2.7% and 2.0%, respectively. Thus, the proposed multi-occupant modelling method could realize a relatively accurate simulation of the multi-occupant behavior.

Keywords

• Air-conditioning usage behavior
• Multi-occupant model
• Occupant behavior modelling
• Office space
• Analytic hierarchy process