User Interactions with Building Systems and the Energy Implications in Offices

The present book describes the results of a study to capture patterns of user control actions in offices of Vienna international center in Austria with regard to buildings'' technical systems for heating, cooling and lighting based on a long-term study. It describes an effort to observe control-oriented occupants'' behavior in 29 offices of the large high-rise office complex over a period of one year. Specifically, states and events pertaining to occupancy, building systems, indoor environment, and external environment were monitored. The main task of the project is to monitor and analyze the behavior of the monitored occupants for providing a better understanding of occupants'' interactions with building energy systems. The results reveal distinct patterns in the collected data. Specifically, control behavior tendencies show dependencies both on indoor environmental conditions and outdoor environmental parameters. These kinds of relationships have the potential to provide the basis of behavioral models for control-oriented user actions in buildings. Such models can subsequently be integrated in comprehensive building information models to support facility management and indoor environmental control operations in buildings.