Building Occupancy Behavior and Prediction Methods: A Critical Review and Challenging Locks

Abstract

Energy use in buildings is increasing to provide optimal comfort for the occupants. People spend 90% of their lifetime in buildings. Therefore, indoor environment quality and comfort management have a crucial role in maintaining occupants’ health and productivity. Reducing energy consumption for optimal comfort management is important to minimize CO2 emission and global warming by the building sector. According to the literature, it is possible to control and reduce energy consumption by monitoring occupants’ behavior and estimating the number of occupants. A critical review is carried out in this paper to analyze the existing methodologies for modeling occupant behavior and prediction with respect to comfort and energy management. A comprehensive analysis is also performed on recent developments and challenges in modeling, along with recommendations and future perspectives.

Keywords

• Building comfort
• energy consumption
• occupancy prediction
• occupant behavior
• stochastic behavior
• smart building