Towards a Rigorous Consideration of Occupant Behaviours of Residential Households for Effective Electrical Energy Savings: An Overview

Abstract

There are two primary ways to save energy within a building: (1) through improving building engineering structures and adopting efficient appliance ownership, and (2) through changing occupants’ energy-consuming behaviors. Unfortunately the second way suffers from many challenges and limitations. Occupant behavior is, indeed, a complex and multi-disciplinary concept depending on several human factors. Although its importance is recognized by the energy management community, it is often oversimplified and naively defined when used to study, analyze or model energy load. This paper aims at promoting the definition of occupant behavior as well as exploring the extent to which the latter is involved in research works, targeting directly or indirectly energy savings. Hence, in this work, we propose an overview of interdisciplinary research approaches that consider occupants’ energy-saving behaviors, while we present the big picture and evaluate how occupant behavior is defined, we also propose a categorization of the major works that consider energy-consuming occupant behavior. Our findings via a literature review methodology, based on a bibliometric study, reveal a growth of the number of research works involving occupant behavior to model load forecasting and household segmentation. We have equally identified a research trend showing an increasing interest in studying how to successfully change occupant behaviors towards energy saving.

Energy Conservation at Home: A Critical Review on the Role of End-User Behavior

“…Energy conservation in the domestic environment has been largely studied in its multiple facets, as proven by the available reviews and meta-studies [39,[148][149][150]. It emerges that due to the complex nature of the topic, the survey is the most widely used research means [28,56,58,105,106,108,124,138,142,151].…”

“…[164]; Fatoki 2022 [165] Need for an integrated approach Gaspari et al, 2021 [28]; Dietz et al, 2013 [166]; Gram-Hanssen 2013 [167]; Savvidou et al, 2020 [168] 4.1. Chance for Savings and Role of Users' Behavior Nowadays, the majority of researchers in the field agree that occupants can strongly affect the energy demand, either acting on the physical features of the building or changing energy use practices [39,40]. Accordingly, energy-saving opportunities emerging from the selected articles can be grouped into two main clusters:…”

A Simultaneous Usage Ratio Based on Occupant Behavior: A Case Study of Intermittent Heating in an Apartment Building in Japan

“…A review paper on educating occupants [34] concluded that energy savings of 4-30% are possible. However, as a problem on the part of occupants in general, many studies [35][36][37][38] pointed out that there is a large gap between knowledge and behavior regarding energy saving. If these behaviors could be practiced, energy consumption would be reduced, which is desirable.…”

Factor analysis of household behaviours in saving energy

“…People are at the center of energy efficiency efforts, and an understanding of the behavioral sciences can help develop smarter policies" [7]. Bouktif, S. et al [8] have re-viewed the accounting of household behavior in energy conservation.…”