EXPLORING THE VALIDITY OF OCCUPANT BEHAVIOR MODEL FOR IMPROVING OFFICE BUILDING ENERGY SIMULATION

Building energy use is significantly influenced by building occupants or users. The integration of a robust occupant behavior model that captures energy-related behaviors and a building energy model will have the potential to improve energy simulation performance, as current virtual model of building lacks dynamic and practical occupant information input. Agent-based Modeling (ABM) has been successfully applied to model interactions between occupants and building components, but most of the models were developed on a simulation basis without actual data involvement. To address on this issue, this paper proposes an approach to modeling occupant behaviors in office buildings via the design of a novel ABM and relevant data collection for model testing and validation. A case study is conducted to investigate the performance of the model. The results show the applicability of the ABM and provide a feasible direction for tuning ABM for the purpose of building energy simulation improvement.