On Behavioral Action Hierarchy for Understanding Occupants’ Attitudes Driving Indoor Thermal Comfort in Office Buildings
Abstract
Occupant behavior is one of the major factors influencing building energy consumption and contributing to uncertainty in building energy use prediction and simulation. Currently, the understanding of occupant behavior is insufficient in building design, operation, and retrofit, leading to incorrect simplifications in modeling and analysis. Recently, the need to integrate social science aspects into energy research has brought more awareness about the role of occupants in buildings and how their actions may be driven. Within this study, we identify a sort of behavioral actions’ temporal sequence in a form of timing priority action logic to represent progressive occupants’ decisions. This work will contribute to the scientific investigation about the impact of occupants’ behavior in building energy assessments by determining a novel behavioral action hierarchy, useful for future advanced algorithm development in dynamic thermal-energy building simulation.