Simulation Research On Occupant Energy-related Behaviors In Building

The differences in lifestyle and building usage modes are the primary cause of the huge differences in building energy consumption between China and developed countries.A lot of investigations indicate that occupant energy-related behaviors have big differences and lead to significant differences in building energy use, and different behaviors or lifestyles need different energy saving technologies. Thus, accurate description of occupant behavior and lifestyle is very important for evaluating our country’s efforts on building energy saving, guiding the application of building energy efficient technology and making building energy standards or codes. However, due to the complexity, there is no feasible description method for occupant behaviors up to now, which makes a common difficulty and bottle neck in the survey, analysis, definition and simulation of occupant behaviors.For solving this problem, a new approach for the quantitative description of occupant behaviors is proposed in this thesis. The key ideas of the approach includes: 1) Defining occupant behaviors as actions that change the state of objects(occupant location, the operation state of windows, lights, air-conditioners, etc.), which break through the traditional methods emphasizing “the state of objects”and shift the focus to “the state change of objects”. From the action-based viewpoint, the research objectives of occupant behaviors are two kinds of actions—movement and control action(open window,close window, turn on AC, turn off AC, turn on light, turn off light, etc.). 2) Based on the principle of representing the main characteristics of occupant behaviors, using behavioral“pattern”and“characteristic parameters”to simplify and quantify the description of all actions. Every action can be classified by several typical patterns representing the individual differences, and patterns of different actions can be combined to describe a typical occupant. 3) The description method and typical behavioral patterns can be verified,validated and accredited by mean of questionnaire survey, monitoring of case study, and building simulation. The three means can be combined to support and check each other.Based on the above framework, the thesis investigated the time-related, environmentrelated, and random features of occupant behaviors, and established a basic model of occupant movement and that of control actions respectively. Further, several typical patterns are predefined for occupant behaviors in office and residential buildings. Finally,demonstrate the application of the description method in survey, analysis, definition and simulation of occupant behaviors.The results show the new method is simpler and more effective than the traditional ones. It can accurately quantitatively represent the behavioral characteristics of individuals and be easy to apply in the survey, analysis, definition and simulation of occupant behaviors. Based on the method, more work of great value can be carried out in future and advance our country’s efforts on building energy saving towards the road at the basis of real lifestyle.