Conference Paper

Proceedings of Building Simulation 2021: 17th Conference of IBPSA

The impact of using actual occupancy data on building performance simulation results for a multi-purpose university building

Mahsa Sayfikar, David P. Jenkins
Heriot Watt University, United Kingdom

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26868/25222708.2021.30187
Abstract: Inaccurate assumptions made about occupants’ presence and numbers are one of the most important factors contributing to the gap between simulation results and actual energy consumption (performance gap). Many studies have investigated the impacts of occupancy models on building simulation results, but such impacts on the performance gap has been less considered. This paper studies the impact of occupancy data compared to weather data on the performance gap for a case study university building by comparing simulation results using standard occupancy profiles and observed occupancy data against half-hourly and monthly meter data. The results present an improvement of 14.4% in CV(RMSE) (coefficient of variation for the root mean square error) due to using observed occupancy data compared to an improvement of 4.3% due to using actual weather data, which highlights the significance of occupancy inputs for simulation of multi-purpose academic buildings similar to the case study.
Keywords: building energy, university buildings, occupancy, building performance simulation, data collection
Pages: 3409 - 3416
Paper: