| Most advances in building energy efficient technologies have been made to improve the physical characteristics of buildings, such as building facades and HVAC equipment. However, the behavior of occupants also greatly attributes to the energy consumption of a building because the people in a building act as the drivers of thermal comfort, lighting behavior, window and shading device behavior, and electrical equipment use. Many of the recent studies on occupant behavior have focused on residential and commercial buildings, especially office buildings. The studies emphasize how to model occupant behavior in these buildings, and how the results of occupant behavior models can be integrated with building performance simulations. There has been a lack of studies of occupant behavior in institutional buildings, and thus the focus this study has been to investigate the occupant presence behavior in an institutional building located in Laramie, Wyoming. A survey of occupant behavior, focused on occupant presence, was conducted at the Classroom Building of the University of Wyoming. The survey data was analyzed and utilized to develop an occupant presence model that is both stochastic and deterministic in nature. This is because the number of occupants in a classroom is deterministic due to the class schedule, but it is also random in some level triggered by unquantified reasons. The model is able to evaluate occupant presence fluctuations on a 10-minute interval, providing simulated occupant presences that were integrated into an EnergyPlus model. Simulations have been completed for two occupant schedules by modifying occupant profiles: (1) an enrollment schedule using class enrollment data, and (2) a scenario using the simulated occupant schedule from the occupant presence model. The EnergyPlus simulation results showed that the simulated occupant schedule had a substantial impact on the accuracy of the electric energy consumption, but that the effects on steam energy consumption were minimal. Overall, the simulated occupant presence schedule increased the EnergyPlus estimation of the total site energy by 2.11%, which brought the simulated energy consumption of the building nearer the actual utility data of the Classroom Building. This shows that including occupant presence modeling into building energy simulations increases simulation accuracy for an institutional building. Furthermore, the improved accuracy of simulating end use demand profiles should be utilized for campus operations, power plant demand management, and efficiency improvements. |
