Activity based & behavioural occupancy modelling for EE building design

Resumen

155

Analysis of building energy efficiency at the early stages of the design process has been viewed in the past few years with increasing interest by key stakeholders such as architects, designers and mechanical engineers as well as by the research community. Early design products comprise features that determine to a large extend energy performance and thus can provide critical evidence to simulation and analysis tools for thorough evaluation of design alternatives. Capitalizing on the actual effect of building occupancy (human presence and movement) in the overall energy consumption during the early design phases of a building, this paper addresses the need for a common set of reference models definition for correlating the two disjoint worlds in the building domain, the building information models and the business processes models of an organization that will be housed in the building. The paper introduces a set of domain semantically enriched models that can express occupancy using spatio-temporal information and incorporate space utilization definitions taking into account enterprise-related information at various levels. To cope with interoperability with existing simulation tools, a provisional extension to the green building schema (gbXML) is examined towards incorporating the necessary information needed for realistic and accurate evaluation and optimization of alternative energy efficient building designs.