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F. Tahmasebi, A. Mahdavi:
"A Systematic Assessment of the Sensitivity of Building Performance Simulation Results with Regard to Occupancy-Related Input Assumptions";
in: "Proceedings of the 14 IBPSA Conference", V Garg et al. (ed.); issued by: IBPSA; IBPSA, Hyderabad, India, 2015, Paper ID 2164, 7 pages.

The considerable performance implications of occupants' presence and behaviour in buildings render the inclusion of corresponding models in building performance simulation applications both necessary and critical. In this context, an important question concerns the implications of selecting a specific occupany modelling approach for building performance simulation results. The present contribution adresses this issue by modelling an existing - continuously monitored - office building to obtain the annual and peak heating and cooling demands in a sequence of simulation runs. Thereby, different occupancy-related diversity profiles (standard-based, average and individual observation-based), randon realizations of these profiles (obtained from a stochastic occupancy model), and the original full-year observational data are deployed to represent occupancy in the simulation model. The simulation results suggest that the viability of simulation results is primarily dependent on the availability of reliable estimations of actual occupancy levels. In contrast, it is of little significaance wheter probabilistic or non-probabilistic representations of such estimations are deployed.

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