Behavioral and parametric effects on energy consumption through BIM, BEM, and ABM

Abstract

Over the past years, several tools and methods have been developed to address performance-related designs and provide designers with integrative platforms to estimate building energy consumption and mitigate its impact. However, the predictions obtained through different energy modeling engines have been typically deviating from the actual energy consumption. As such, many efforts have attempted at bridging this so-called "performance gap. Nonetheless, this was conducted in a fragmented fashion whereby synchronizing the geometric exchange of Building Information Modeling (BIM) to Building Energy Modeling (BEM) was done independently from incorporating, through Agent-Based Modelling (ABM), building occupants' behavior vis-à-vis energy consumption. Therefore, this paper merges the aforementioned approaches and presents work targeted at assessing the diverse and dynamic energy-use behavior of occupants using BIM, BEM and ABM. To that end, a simulation environment was developed to study both the parametric design and behavioural factors. The design parameters included within a BIM model were utilized to set the thermal zone, the internal zone gains were defined using ABM, and resulting data was exported as an input data file to EnergyPlus. Several experiments have been conducted for the case of an academic office and results of the energy analysis highlighted a variation of up to 11% as compared to static occupant behavioral patterns generally adopted.

Li-BIM, an agent-based approach to simulate occupant-building interaction from the Building-Information Modelling

“…To date, ABMs have been mostly used to simulate occupants' behaviour in office (Zhang, Siebers and Aickelin, 2011;Langevin, Wen and Gurian, 2015;Carmenate et al, 2016;Chen, Hong and Luo, 2018;Hajj-Hassan and Khoury, 2018) or for occupancy patterns in commercial buildings or university campus (e.g., Azar and Al Ansari, 2017;Azar and Menassa, 2010;Erickson et al, 2009;Liao, Lin and Barooah, 2012;Lee and Malkawi, 2014). This review intends to collect papers using ABM to simulate user behaviour in dwellings.…”