Analysis and modelling of occupant behaviour to support building design and performance optimisation

With the alarming findings of climate change research, it is getting more and more important to investigate the main contributors to buildings’ energy consumption as buildings are one of the most significant contributors to green house emissions. Building energy regulations focus on increasing the performance of building structures and energy supply systems. This way, overall energy use associated with building characteristics is decreasing. However, it was observed that human behaviour in buildings plays an essential role in the energyrelated behaviour of a building. When an occupant turns on the heating, opens the window or switches on the light, the energy balance of the building changes affecting the overall energy consumption of the building. As the construction industry moved towards building higher performing building structures and systems, the role of the occupants and their behaviour in buildings is more important than ever. With my PhD research introduced in this document, I intended to provide insight into the field of energy-related occupant behaviour in buildings and to fill certain the gaps of this research field. Numerous research projects have been published recently investigating and establishing theories of energy-related occupant behaviour and on the possible uses of these theories and models to enhance energy performance predictions. However, only a few researcher groups have been investigating the practical implementation of this field in case of different construction life-cycle stages and different building types. One of the key objectives of this work was to fill this gap and provide insights into the aspects of occupant behaviour representation in case of project in the original design, operation optimization or in the retrofitting phase. Also, the projects introduced here were conducted in different building types and tried to cover differences and potentially different aspects of occupant behaviour to consider in case of residential, commercial, higher education and primary education buildings. As this field of research has an extended background and many decades of history in many northern and western European countries (Switzerland, Germany, UK, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway etc. ), in China, in the USA, Canada, and in Australia, my goal was also to introduce this field in central Europe and to start establishing a Hungarian culture-specific set of investigations and groundtruth taking into account local conditions (technical, construction industry-related, climatic, social). In this PhD thesis, my results are presented fulfilling the research objectives. After a thorough review of this field, firstly, I showed the order of magnitude of impact that the occupants have on the overall energy consumption in case of different building types and also the fact that currently occupant behaviour is represented in an oversimplified way (main result I/1-2). This is followed by the introduction to the first representative Hungarian office occupant behaviour dataset and its analysis that I conducted in a framework of an international project (main result II/1-3). With my investigation on the process of a company office move, I managed to differentiate the real impact of physical and social drivers on the behaviour of the office population (main result III/1-3). As school buildings are underrepresented in behavioural studies currently, I contributed to this field with a window opening and closing investigation study in a school building (main result IV). Finally, I summarized my work on occupant behaviour modelling in building performance simulation (main result V). It is essential for the future advancement of this field to reach an agreement of common modelling approaches to enhance comparability.