Computational tools for building design and operation support entail fairly detailed representations of buildings' geometry, construction, and systems. Recent efforts aim at enhancing, in these tools, the relatively less developed models of building users. Thereby, one of the key challenges concerns the fit between the nature and level of needed support (e.g., performance queries) on the one hand and the required or appropriate resolution of the applied occupant model on the other hand. Some queries involving aggregate performance indicator may be sufficiently served by simple models of occupants' presence and actions in buildings. Detailed queries, however, may necessitate the implementation of high-resolution dynamic occupant representations. Methods to generate an occupant model may be fully data-driven, or they may be based on explicitly stated causal theories of human behaviour. However, there is not necessarily a sharp boundary between these approaches: Regularities harnessed by data-driven methods often reveal an implicit theoretical feature, as they are key to mapping processes from independent variables (model input) to dependent variables (manifest behaviour). Causal methods, on the other hand, need data to both develop and calibrate occupant methods. In this context, the present paper introduces the outline and main elements of a pragmatic theory of control-oriented human behaviour in buildings. The theory is suggested to inform the efforts towards construction of occupant models in computational applications related to building design, operation, and evaluation. Specifically, it can systematically guide the formulation of occupant-related ontologies and their instantiation in computational applications.
A discussion of sustainability in architecture cannot be meaningfully carried out without the inclusion of most buildings’ central purpose, namely the provision of indoor environments that are accommodating of occupants’ needs and requirements. To this end, building designers and operators are expected to demonstrate compliance with codes and standards pertaining to indoor environmental quality (IEQ). However, the majority of conventional IEQ standards, codes, and guidelines have a single-domain character, in that they address IEQ in terms of a number of isolated domains (i.e., thermal, visual, acoustic, air quality). In this context, the present contribution explores the current state of multi-domain IEQ evaluation approaches and the necessary conditions for their further development and application. Toward this end, a number of common building rating schemes were selected and analyzed in detail. The results of this assessment imply the necessity of both short-term improvements of the existing schemes in terms of the transparency and plausibility of the applied point allocation and weighting strategies and the fundamental need for a deeper empirically grounded understanding of the nature of occupants’ perception of and behavior in the built environments.
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