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With the fundamental and design processes established, this chapter dives into occupant modeling theory and techniques. Following Chapter 2, it starts with basic concepts of occupant behavior and occupant actions. It provides some retrospective analysis of how occupants are currently modeled in design practice and building codes (based on several recent international surveys). Next, the chapter reviews a wide spectrum of models in increasing levels of complexity, including: schedules, rule-based models, various stochastic models, agent-based models, and personas. With the types of models established, theoretical and practical insights are provided regarding model development and verification. While this chapter is mainly focused on theory, it also provides an overview of methods to incorporate occupant models into BPS tools. Finally, with the introduction of more complex and less transparent occupant models, the chapter provides some examples and insights about communicating their results to different stakeholders.

In shared office spaces, occupants' comfort criteria are limited to locally controlled zones while ambient features of the environment and the potential negative impacts of others' behavior require a well-designed control system, especially over adaptive façade elements. This means setting up control strategies for a wider spectrum of varying comfort perceptions from person to person dictates an approach towards personalizing adaptive facades. Thereby, this research coupled a simulation-based methodology with fuzzy logic and a genetic algorithm to personalize façade modules based on the visual discomfort conditions of the occupants. Results confirmed that increasing the control freedom by personalization accounting for multi-objective criteria including glare, daylight, and view could satisfy occupants from 83% to 100%. Moreover, the proposed façade personalization framework could enhance visual comfort compared with two typical automated Venetian blind controls, significantly. This study provides novel insights for designers and operators to decentralize facades' elements by accepting occupants’ feedback as part of their control loops., Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public., History, Form & Aesthetics