A systematic literature review on occupant behaviour modelling for residential building performance simulation in future climate change scenarios

Abstract

This systematic review explores the new topic of occupant behaviour (OB) modelling for building performance analysis of residential buildings in future climate change scenarios. The research provides an overview of how occupants are typically simulated in studies related to multi-domain building performance, with focus on three performance domains: thermal, energy and air quality. Furthermore, it explores different approaches to modelling occupants’ characteristics, presence and adaptive behaviour traits. It discusses aspects of diversity, stochasticity and uncertainty regarding occupants’ actions. Finally, it describes a social practice method that might be utilised in residential building simulation, by creating scenarios of household dynamics for future changing society. The results of this literature review indicate that the current approach to OB modelling for multi-domain building performance is mostly oversimplified. Current OB models typically include a single occupancy scenario and do not account for behavioural changes other than thermal adaptation. However, a new generation of OB models present alternatives to account for the diversity, stochasticity, and uncertainty of occupant behaviour. These create multiple occupancy scenarios with data from national surveys, develop stochastic OB models from previous field studies and employ uncertainty/sensitivity analysis into deterministic models. The review found that the application of social practices might allow the development of future scenarios of living to be integrated into future studies of residential building simulation. This review recommends that future research develops occupant behaviour models through the exploration of datasets, creates diverse scenarios of OB modelling and accounts for changes in occupancy dynamics in future scenarios.