2017 ASHRAE Annual Conference

An interdisciplinary and international survey is developed for systematic identification of environmental, cognitive and behavioral factors (and their interrelations) influencing control options in office buildings. This study is conducted through the development of questions directed at attitude, subjective norms, perceived control and other related concepts as organized in the Social Cognitive Theory and the Theory of Planned Behavior. The survey is distributed to 14 Universities among six countries in four continents (America, Asia, Europe, Australia). The questionnaire survey assesses office configuration type, thermal comfort, social norms, attitudes toward energy saving, demographics, etc.

This study presents a new method to summarize typical behavior patterns in residential buildings in China regarding air-conditioning use. A large-scale questionnaire survey was designed and conducted to get behavior patterns, which were then used in energy simulation. Based on the energy consumption, the behavior patterns were classified into categories and a typical pattern was extracted from each category. Finally, the typical behavior patterns were validated by the distribution testing of building energy consumption. These typical behavior patterns could be used to estimate the energy consumption with different composition of occupants and evaluate the energy saving potential of different technologies.

The issues of energy consumption and occupant behaviors should not be an individualistic focus, assuming that people will control their behaviors and make rational choices. These complex issues extend to organizations and other social contexts as well. This presentation presents the empirical findings regarding the social-psychological and demographic variables affecting energy saving behaviors in both commercial and residential settings. In addition, the influence of social-psychological factors on the U.S. residents’ public acceptance of smart meters and demand response programs is presented. Importantly, this presentation discusses several important social science theories in measuring energy saving behaviors and intentions.

Traditional energy simulation tools only consider fixed energy-related schedules and do not incorporate real time effects of occupants’ behavioral patterns in energy simulation. In this talk, an inter-disciplinary, Adaptive Building Simulation framework collecting actual building indoor environment data (through sensors) and human physiological and behavioral data (through wearable devices, polling apps, and surveys) and incorporate these data into a coupled and distributed software simulation system is presented. A case study performed using this framework measured occupants’ thermal comfort related actions and its effects on energy use in buildings and the results indicated energy savings by influencing the occupant behavior.