Toward empirically-based models of people's presence and actions in buildings

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. However, general control-related behavioral trends and patterns for groups of building occupants can be extracted from long-term observational data. Moreover, such trends and patterns show in many instances significant relationships to measureable indoor and outdoor environmental parameters. They can thus provide a reliable basis for occupancy and control action models in performance simulation applications.