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Publications in Scientific Journals:

W. OŽBrien, H. Burak Gunay, F. Tahmasebi, A. Mahdavi:
"A preliminary study of representing the inter-occupant diversity in occupant modelling";
Journal of Building Performance Simulation, 10 (2017), 5-6; 509 - 526.



English abstract:
Significant diversity between occupants and their presence and actions results in major uncertainty with regard to predicting
building performance. However, many current occupant modelling approaches - even stochastic ones - suppress occupant
diversity by focusing on developing representative occupants. Accordingly, existing approaches tend to limit the ability
of stochastic occupant models to provide probabilistic building performance distributions. Using occupancy data from 16
private offices, this paper evaluated three hypotheses: (1) occupant parameters have a continuous distribution rather than
discrete; (2) modelling occupants from aggregated data suppresses diversity; and (3) randomly selecting occupant traits
exaggerates synthetic population diversity. The paper indicates that samples sizes for the studied occupants would have
more appropriately been an order of magnitude higher: hundreds. This introductory paper shows that there are many future
research needs with regard to modelling occupants.

German abstract:
(no german version available) Significant diversity between occupants and their presence and actions results in major uncertainty with regard to predicting
building performance. However, many current occupant modelling approaches - even stochastic ones - suppress occupant
diversity by focusing on developing representative occupants. Accordingly, existing approaches tend to limit the ability
of stochastic occupant models to provide probabilistic building performance distributions. Using occupancy data from 16
private offices, this paper evaluated three hypotheses: (1) occupant parameters have a continuous distribution rather than
discrete; (2) modelling occupants from aggregated data suppresses diversity; and (3) randomly selecting occupant traits
exaggerates synthetic population diversity. The paper indicates that samples sizes for the studied occupants would have
more appropriately been an order of magnitude higher: hundreds. This introductory paper shows that there are many future
research needs with regard to modelling occupants.

Keywords:
occupant modelling; occupant diversity; sample size; presence/occupancy


"Official" electronic version of the publication (accessed through its Digital Object Identifier - DOI)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19401493.2016.1261943

Electronic version of the publication:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19401493.2016.1261943


Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.