The role of environmental and personal variables in influencing thermal comfort indices used in building simulation

The need to identify variables, which influence human behaviour, has become one of the priorities in the quest to reduce energy demand. Environmental and personal variables, as set out in the thermal comfort models, have long been associated with people’s behaviour by predicting their state of thermal comfort or rather discomfort. The aim of this paper is to explore and to report on the influences of these variables on thermal discomfort indices used in building simulation models. Surprisingly, the results of the sensitivity analysis show that different indices are most sensitives to different variables.