Modelling the occupant behaviour impact on buildings energy prediction

Building retrofitting projects represent great opportunities to include new energy efficient technologies, already available on the market. However, for many of these technologies, the occupants’ behaviour within the building can weaken the expected return on investment. This is special true in intelligent technologies that try to compensate the lack of user awareness of energy consumption problems. This chapter describes a model for occupant behaviour within the building in relation to energy consumption, along with a building energy consumption model (ECM) is proposed based on stochastic Markov models. The ECM is used to predict possible energy saving gains from building retrofitting projects. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed ECM learns occupant behavioural patterns from the building. Additionally, it reliably reproduces them, predicts the building energy consumption and identifies potential areas of energy waste. The ultimate objective of the proposed models is the integration in Decision Support Tools to advise the investor on the selection of technologies and evaluate the merits of the investment.