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Occupant behavior has significant impacts on building energy performance and occupant comfort. However, occupant behavior is not well understood and is often oversimplified in the building life cycle, due to its stochastic, diverse, complex, and interdisciplinary nature. The use of simplified methods or tools to quantify the impacts of occupant behavior in building performance simulations significantly contributes to performance gaps between simulated models and actual building energy consumption. Therefore, it is crucial to understand occupant behavior in a comprehensive way, integrating qualitative approaches and data-and model-driven quantitative approaches, and employing appropriate tools to guide the design and operation of low-energy residential and commercial buildings that integrate technological and human dimensions. This paper presents ten questions, highlighting some of the most important issues regarding concepts, applications, and methodologies in occupant behavior research. The proposed questions and answers aim to provide insights into occupant behavior for current and future researchers, designers, and policy makers, and most importantly, to inspire innovative research and applications to increase energy efficiency and reduce energy use in buildings.

More than 30% of the total primary energy in the world is consumed in buildings. It is crucial to reduce building energy consumption in order to preserve energy resources and mitigate global climate change. Building performance simulations have been widely used for the estimation and optimization of building performance, providing reference values for the assessment of building energy consumption and the effects of energy-saving technologies. Among the various factors influencing building energy consumption, occupant behavior has drawn increasing attention. Occupant behavior includes occupant presence, movement, and interaction with building energy devices and systems. However, there are gaps in occupant behavior modeling as different energy modelers have employed varied data and tools to simulate occupant behavior, therefore producing different and incomparable results. Aiming to address these gaps, the International Energy Agency (IEA) Energy in Buildings and Community (EBC) Programme Annex 66 has established a scientific methodological framework for occupant behavior research, including data collection, behavior model representation, modeling and evaluation approaches, and the integration of behavior modeling tools with building performance simulation programs. Annex 66 also includes case studies and application guidelines to assist in building design, operation, and policymaking, using interdisciplinary approaches to reduce energy use in buildings and improve occupant comfort and productivity. This paper highlights the key research issues, methods, and outcomes pertaining to Annex 66, and offers perspectives on future research needs to integrate occupant behavior with the building life cycle.

Reducing energy consumption in the buildings sector requires significant changes, but technology alone may fail to guarantee efficient energy performance. Human behavior plays a pivotal role in building design, operation, management and retrofit, and is a crucial positive factor for improving the indoor environment, while reducing energy use at low cost. Over the past 40 years, a substantial body of literature has explored the impacts of human behavior on building technologies and operation. Often, need-action-event cognitive theoretical frameworks were used to represent human-machine interactions. In Part I of this paper a review of more than 130 published behavioral studies and frameworks was conducted. A large variety of data-driven behavioral models have been developed based on field monitoring of the human-building-system interaction. Studies have emerged scattered geographically around the world that lack in standardization and consistency, thus leading to difficulties when comparing one with another. To address this problem, an ontology to represent energy-related occupant behavior in buildings is presented. Accordingly, the technical DNAs framework is developed based on four key components: i) the Drivers of behavior, ii) the Needs of the occupants, iii) the Actions carried out by the occupants, and iv) the building systems acted upon by the occupants. This DNAs framework is envisioned to support the international research community to standardize a systematic representation of energyrelated occupant behavior in buildings. Part II of this paper further develops the DNAs framework as an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) schema, obXML, for exchange of occupant information modeling and integration with building simulation tools.

Understanding the relationship between occupant behaviors and building energy consumption is one of the most effective ways to bridge the gap between predicted and actual energy consumption in buildings. However effective methodologies to remove the impact of other variables on building energy consumption and isolate the leverage of the human factor precisely are still poorly investigated. Moreover, the effectiveness of statistical and data mining approaches in finding meaningful correlations in data is largely undiscussed in literature. This study develops a framework combining statistical analysis with two data-mining techniques, cluster analysis and association rules mining, to identify valid window operational patterns in measured data. Analyses are performed on a data set with measured indoor and outdoor physical parameters and human interaction with operable windows in 16 offices. Logistic regression was first used to identify factors influencing window opening and closing behavior. Clustering procedures were employed to obtain distinct behavioral patterns, including motivational, opening duration, interactivity and window position patterns. Finally the clustered patterns constituted a base for association rules segmenting the window opening behaviors into two archetypal office user profiles for which different natural ventilation strategies as well as robust building design recommendations that may be appropriate. Moreover, discerned working user profiles represent more accurate input to building energy modeling programs, to investigate the impacts of typical window opening behavior scenarios on energy use, thermal comfort and productivity in office buildings.

a b s t r a c tEnergy-related occupant behavior in buildings is difficult to define and quantify, yet critical to our understanding of total building energy consumption. Part I of this two-part paper introduced the DNAS (Drivers, Needs, Actions and Systems) framework, to standardize the description of energy-related occupant behavior in buildings. Part II of this paper implements the DNAS framework into an XML (eXtensible Markup Language) schema, titled 'occupant behavior XML' (obXML). The obXML schema is used for the practical implementation of the DNAS framework into building simulation tools. The topology of the DNAS framework implemented in the obXML schema has a main root element OccupantBehavior, linking three main elements representing Buildings, Occupants and Behaviors. Using the schema structure, the actions of turning on an air conditioner and closing blinds provide two examples of how the schema standardizes these actions using XML. The obXML schema has inherent flexibility to represent numerous, diverse and complex types of occupant behaviors in buildings, and it can also be expanded to encompass new types of behaviors. The implementation of the DNAS framework into the obXML schema will facilitate the development of occupant information modeling (OIM) by providing interoperability between occupant behavior models and building energy modeling programs.

The "human dimensions" of energy use in buildings refer to the energy-related behaviors of key stakeholders that affect energy use over the building life cycle. Stakeholders include building designers, operators, managers, engineers, occupants, industry, vendors, and policymakers, who directly or indirectly influence the acts of designing, constructing, living, operating, managing, and regulating the built environments, from individual building up to the urban scale. Among factors driving high-performance buildings, human dimensions play a role that is as significant as that of technological advances. However, this factor is not well understood, and, as a result, human dimensions are often ignored or simplified by stakeholders. This paper presents a review of the literature on human dimensions of building energy use to assess the state-of-the-art in this topic area. The paper highlights research needs for fully integrating human dimensions into the building design and operation processes with the goal of reducing energy use in buildings while enhancing occupant comfort and productivity. This research focuses on identifying key needs for each stakeholder involved in a building's life cycle and takes an interdisciplinary focus that spans the fields of architecture and engineering design, sociology, data science, energy policy, codes, and standards to provide targeted insights.Greater understanding of the human dimensions of energy use has several potential benefits including reductions in operating cost for building owners; enhanced comfort conditions and productivity for building occupants; more effective building energy management and automation systems for building operators and energy managers; and the integration of more accurate control logic into the next generation of human-in-the-loop technologies. The review concludes by summarizing recommendations for policy makers and industry stakeholders for developing codes, standards, and technologies that can leverage the human dimensions of energy use to reliably predict and achieve energy use reductions in the residential and commercial buildings sectors.

Building occupancy is a paramount factor in building energy simulations. Specifically, lighting, plug loads, HVAC equipment utilization, fresh air requirements and internal heat gain or loss greatly depends on the level of occupancy within a building. Developing the appropriate methodologies to describe and reproduce the intricate network responsible for human-building interactions are needed. Extrapolation of patterns from big data streams is a powerful analysis technique which will allow for a better understanding of energy usage in buildings. A three-step data mining framework is applied to discover occupancy patterns in office spaces. First, a data set of 16 offices with 10 minute interval occupancy data, over a two year period is mined through a decision tree model which predicts the occupancy presence. Then a rule induction algorithm is used to learn a pruned set of rules on the results from the decision tree model. Finally, a cluster analysis is employed in order to obtain consistent patterns of occupancy schedules. The identified occupancy rules and schedules are representative as four archetypal working profiles that can be used as input to current building energy modeling programs, such as EnergyPlus or IDA-ICE, to investigate impact of occupant presence on design, operation and energy use in office buildings.