Advancing occupant modeling for building design and code compliance

This final article of a three-part series on the advances of occupant modeling for building design and code compliance is focused on recommendations and future outlook. To summarize the first two parts, we argued and demonstrated that current occupant modeling approaches (particularly as mandated by the performance path of building energy codes) are often inadequate in the context that: 1) occupants do not passively tolerate discomfort (as is implicitly assumed by fixed schedules), but rather actively attempt to restore comfort, frequently with energy consequences, and 2) there is considerable uncertainty associated with occupants from the time of design to occupancy and over the building life cycle. Moreover, we showed in a previous ASHRAEJournalarticle (Ouf and O’Brien 2018) that there are major drawbacks to the approach of treating occupants the same in reference and proposed building models without also using reasonable occupant modeling approaches.