Occupant behaviour: a major issue for building energy performance

The building sector in the world is responsible for nearly 36% of the final energy consumption and nearly 40% of total direct and indirect CO2 emissions. One of the most efficient strategies to reduce the energy consumption in buildings is the estimation and optimization of building energy performance. According to the International Energy Agency IEA-EBC[1], several factors influence the energy performance of buildings; one of the significant factors is the occupant behavior. Recently, there has been growing interest in this field. In this context, different methods have been proposed and developed especially when the traditional methods such as interview and survey are not efficient and sufficient to analyze and to predict the occupant behavior with better accuracy. The main objective of this study is to provide a clear definition of the occupant behavior, a review of current approaches to analyze the occupant behavior and presentation of our research that proposes the possibility of including the occupants as a part of the problem and a solution to the problem. This research is a part of a European project H2020 "Holistic Energy and Architectural Retrofit Toolkit (HEART)". (paper)