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This paper introduces a Human and Building Interaction Toolkit (HABIT) for simulating the thermally adaptive behaviors and comfort of office occupants alongside building energy consumption. The toolkit uses the Building Controls Virtual Test Bed (BCVTB) to co-simulate a field-tested, agent-based behavior model with an EnergyPlus medium office model. The usefulness of the toolkit is demonstrated through a series of zone and building-level case study simulations that examine the wisdom of pairing local heating and cooling options with strategic thermostat set point offsets, judging from the energy, Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ), and cost perspectives. Results generally suggest that trading efficient local heating/cooling options for whole space conditioning has both energy and comfort benefits, saving up to 28% of monthly HVAC energy while improving the acceptability of thermal conditions in a Philadelphia climate. Nevertheless, cost analysis shows that the fuel source of conserved energy must be considered – particularly in the case of personal heater use, which adds to electric plug loads and associated utility and CO 2 emissions cost penalties. Moreover, costs from even small changes in simulated occupant productivity tend to overwhelm energy costs, suggesting the need to improve the accuracy and precision of available productivity models across multiple seasons and climates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of commercial building demand response as a demand-side management resource for the electric grid necessitates new decision support resources for customers seeking to assess the benefit–risk tradeoffs of possible strategies for energy flexible building operations. To address this need, we develop surrogate models that predict the impacts of several load flexibility strategies on commercial building electricity demand and indoor temperature, focusing on offices and retail buildings at multiple scales. The surrogate models are fit to a synthetic database generated via whole building simulations, which establish the relationships between the key operational features of a given strategy and potential changes in building demand and temperature across a variety of contexts. The surrogate models are translated to a Bayesian framework to allow straightforward communication of uncertainty and parameter updating given new evidence. We find strong predictive performance across the suite of models, underscoring the usefulness of the approach in guiding decisions about implementing load flexibility strategies under a particular set of operational and environmental conditions. • A range of commercial load flexibility strategies are developed as OpenStudio Measures. • Synthetic data of Measure impacts are compiled across building types, vintages, and climates. • Models fit to synthetic data predict changes in demand and temperature under load flexibility. • A Bayesian framework facilitates model updating and communication of prediction uncertainty. • Acceptable model fit and predictive performance is demonstrated across multiple metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Low-income housing constitutes an important but often overlooked area for energy use reductions within the US residential sector. Given the scarcity of existing information on this subject, this study uses a semi-structured interview format to explore the key behavioral tendencies, energy knowledge gaps, and attitudes among low-income public housing residents, with the goal of demonstrating a process for developing, scoring, and analyzing the interviews that will be useful to other researchers when first engaging complex subjects like behavior in contexts that are not well covered by existing literature. Methods for sampling subjects and iteratively developing an interview guide and response-scoring framework are described, and the usefulness of this approach in allowing both quantitative and qualitative analysis of behavior response data is demonstrated. The paper concludes by illustrating how themes that emerge from the response analysis can be used to inform future surveying and intervention efforts. Key themes include the varying definitions for “comfort” amongst residents; the lack of resident control over the household environment; the tendency for residents to evaluate energy conservation measures (ECMs) in terms of costs, savings, and comfort; the muted differences in behavior between those who do and do not pay energy bills; and the importance of building maintenance and resident energy education to ongoing efficiency efforts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Recent literature has suggested that a building occupant's level of perceived control over their thermal environment plays a significant role in determining their thermal comfort response. The ASHRAE RP-884 report, which led to an optional Adaptive Comfort Standard for use in naturally ventilated office buildings, was a key attempt to identify relationships between perceived control levels and comfort across a large database of occupant responses in the field. Though the study found no conclusive evidence of these relationships, the authors acknowledged that their analytical process involved many questionable assumptions and generalizations, which may have compromised their findings. This study improves upon the RP-884 analysis by taking a more detailed look at three HVAC building studies from within the RP-884 database. Each of these studies contains direct occupant ratings of both perceived control and thermal comfort—ratings that were not available for many of the other RP-884 buildings. Statistical analysis shows that given this detailed focus, significant correlations do indeed appear between key comfort and perceived control variables within the datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The “human dimensions” of energy use in buildings refer to the energy-related behaviors of key stakeholders that affect energy use over the building life cycle. Stakeholders include building designers, operators, managers, engineers, occupants, industry, vendors, and policymakers, who directly or indirectly influence the acts of designing, constructing, living, operating, managing, and regulating the built environments, from individual building up to the urban scale. Among factors driving high-performance buildings, human dimensions play a role that is as significant as that of technological advances. However, this factor is not well understood, and, as a result, human dimensions are often ignored or simplified by stakeholders. This paper presents a review of the literature on human dimensions of building energy use to assess the state-of-the-art in this topic area. The paper highlights research needs for fully integrating human dimensions into the building design and operation processes with the goal of reducing energy use in buildings while enhancing occupant comfort and productivity. This research focuses on identifying key needs for each stakeholder involved in a building’s life cycle and takes an interdisciplinary focus that spans the fields of architecture and engineering design, sociology, data science, energy policy, codes, and standards to provide targeted insights. Greater understanding of the human dimensions of energy use has several potential benefits including reductions in operating cost for building owners; enhanced comfort conditions and productivity for building occupants; more effective building energy management and automation systems for building operators and energy managers; and the integration of more accurate control logic into the next generation of human-in-the-loop technologies. The review concludes by summarizing recommendations for policy makers and industry stakeholders for developing codes, standards, and technologies that can leverage the human dimensions of energy use to reliably predict and achieve energy use reductions in the residential and commercial buildings sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human-Building Interaction (HBI) is a convergent field that represents the growing complexities of the dynamic interplay between human experience and intelligence within built environments. This paper provides core definitions, research dimensions, and an overall vision for the future of HBI as developed through consensus among 25 interdisciplinary experts in a series of facilitated workshops. Three primary areas contribute to and require attention in HBI research: humans (human experiences, performance, and well-being), buildings (building design and operations), and technologies (sensing, inference, and awareness). Three critical interdisciplinary research domains intersect these areas: control systems and decision making, trust and collaboration, and modeling and simulation. Finally, at the core, it is vital for HBI research to center on and support equity, privacy, and sustainability. Compelling research questions are posed for each primary area, research domain, and core principle. State-of-the-art methods used in HBI studies are discussed, and examples of original research are offered to illustrate opportunities for the advancement of HBI research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People spend most of their time inside buildings, and buildings are responsible for approximately one third of total direct and indirect energy-related worldwide carbon emissions. Likewise, buildings in the U.S. account for about 40% of total U.S. energy consumption. Future building development will be driven not only by emerging challenges such as vulnerability to a changing climate and resource scarcity, but also by disruptive innovations and societal changes. Acknowledging the impossibility of predicting future building evolvement, it is imperative to develop a forward-looking vision considering buildings’ significant effect on global environment, primary or source energy consumption, and occupant health, productivity, and wellbeing. As a necessary step in the development of a comprehensive vision, which will be published in a separate document, this article provides an understanding of the past, present, and future building paradigms. It presents the possible future context regarding demography, environment, and resources. It also discusses how building development in the past century was shaped by technology leapfrogging and social movements. It reviews today's key technological and social trends that are likely to influence the design and function of buildings of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]