This paper presents the results of a recent study of people's presence and their interactions with the buildings' environmental systems in a number of buildings in Austria. The intention was to observe user control actions pertaining to building systems while considering the indoor and outdoor environmental conditions under which those actions occurred. The results of this study suggest that such interactions are difficult to predict at the level of an individual person.

Based on six years of continuous measurements, we have analysed in detail the occupancy, thermal and visual parameters influencing blind usage behaviour. This paper begins by presenting some of the key findings from these analyses. Informed by other developments in the literature, we go on to propose an approach for a comprehensive stochastic model for simulating blind usage.

This paper describes a new methodology in calculating accurately the time series utility loads (energy, power, city water, hot water, etc.) in a dwelling. This calculation takes into account the behavioral variations of the dwelling inhabitants. The proposed method contains a procedure for cooling load calculations based on a series of Monte Carlo simulations where the HVAC on/off state and the indoor heat generation schedules are varied, time-step by time-step.

The integration of techniques for uncertainty and sensitivity analysis in building performance simulation (BPS) has a number of potential benefits  related to design. It allows assessing the accuracy of performance predictions; it can be used to provide concept specific design guidance, and it enables a robustness assessment of the design proposal to different future climate scenarios. The later is considered here.

Climate Modelling is a complex task. One of the most important reasons is the presence of a large variety of spatio-temporal scales. There are climatic changes that take place over a time period of a few months and then there are gusts which might last only a few seconds.

The paper examines the importance of using site-specific data in computer simulation of building energy performance. The CAT (Canyon Air Temperature) computer model, which is designed to predict site-specific air temperature in an urban street canyon for extended periods on the basis of data from a reference station exposed to the same meso-scale weather, was used to provide modified input to a series of Ener-Win simulations of the energy performance of a hypothetical office building.

This paper provides a brief, non-exhaustive overview of the status of the application of CFD in building performance simulation for the outdoor environment. It focuses on four topics: (1) pedestrian wind environment around buildings; (2) wind-driven rain on building facades; (3) convective heat and mass transfer coefficients at building surfaces; and (4) air  pollutant dispersion around buildings. For each topic, some specific difficulties, advantages and disadvantages of CFD are addressed.

A jet of cold air is denser then ambient air but it adheres to the ceiling of the room over the given distance when it is blown horizontally close to it. Such behaviour of fluid jets is well-known as Coanda effect and it is widely used in practice like in the case of ventilation and air-conditioning of rooms. This phenomenon is not sufficiently known both in terms of mechanism and quantitative effects.