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Publications in Scientific Journals:

A. Mahdavi, V. Bochukova, C. Berger:
"A Pragmatic Theory of Occupants' Indoor-Environmental Control Behaviour";
Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, November 2021 (2021), 1 - 15.



English abstract:
Computational tools for building design and operation support entail fairly detailed
representations of buildings´ geometry, construction, and systems. Recent efforts aim
at enhancing, in these tools, the relatively less developed models of building users.
Thereby, one of the key challenges concerns the fit between the nature and level
of needed support (e.g., performance queries) on the one hand and the required
or appropriate resolution of the applied occupant model on the other hand. Some
queries involving aggregate performance indicator may be sufficiently served by simple
models of occupants´ presence and actions in buildings. Detailed queries, however, may
necessitate the implementation of high-resolution dynamic occupant representations.
Methods to generate an occupant model may be fully data-driven, or they may be
based on explicitly stated causal theories of human behaviour. However, there is not
necessarily a sharp boundary between these approaches: Regularities harnessed by
data-driven methods often reveal an implicit theoretical feature, as they are key to
mapping processes from independent variables (model input) to dependent variables
(manifest behaviour). Causal methods, on the other hand, need data to both develop
and calibrate occupant methods. In this context, the present paper introduces the
outline and main elements of a pragmatic theory of control-oriented human behaviour
in buildings. The theory is suggested to inform the efforts towards construction of
occupant models in computational applications related to building design, operation, and
evaluation. Specifically, it can systematically guide the formulation of occupant-related
ontologies and their instantiation in computational applications

German abstract:
Computational tools for building design and operation support entail fairly detailed
representations of buildings´ geometry, construction, and systems. Recent efforts aim
at enhancing, in these tools, the relatively less developed models of building users.
Thereby, one of the key challenges concerns the fit between the nature and level
of needed support (e.g., performance queries) on the one hand and the required
or appropriate resolution of the applied occupant model on the other hand. Some
queries involving aggregate performance indicator may be sufficiently served by simple
models of occupants´ presence and actions in buildings. Detailed queries, however, may
necessitate the implementation of high-resolution dynamic occupant representations.
Methods to generate an occupant model may be fully data-driven, or they may be
based on explicitly stated causal theories of human behaviour. However, there is not
necessarily a sharp boundary between these approaches: Regularities harnessed by
data-driven methods often reveal an implicit theoretical feature, as they are key to
mapping processes from independent variables (model input) to dependent variables
(manifest behaviour). Causal methods, on the other hand, need data to both develop
and calibrate occupant methods. In this context, the present paper introduces the
outline and main elements of a pragmatic theory of control-oriented human behaviour
in buildings. The theory is suggested to inform the efforts towards construction of
occupant models in computational applications related to building design, operation, and
evaluation. Specifically, it can systematically guide the formulation of occupant-related
ontologies and their instantiation in computational applications

Keywords:
: behavioural theory, indoor environment, occupant actions, computational models, ontology


"Official" electronic version of the publication (accessed through its Digital Object Identifier - DOI)
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2021.748288

Electronic version of the publication:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsc.2021.748288/full


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