Energy consumption in office buildings highly depends on occupant energy-use behaviors and intervening these behaviors could function as a cost-effective approach to enhance energy savings. Current behavior-intervention techniques extensively rely on occupant-specific energy-use information at the workstation level and often ignore shared appliances. It is because an occupant typically has full responsibility for her workstation appliances energy consumption and shares the responsibility of the shared appliances energy consumption. However, understanding energy-use behavior of both workstation and shared appliances is necessary for applying appropriate behavior-intervention techniques. Despite this importance, there is still no practical and scalable method to capture personalized energy-use information of workstation and shared appliances since the conventional methods use plug-in power meters that are extremely expensive and difficult to maintain over long period of time. To address this gap, we propose a comprehensive occupant-level energy-usage approach which utilizes the data from the internet of things devices in office buildings to provide information related to energy-use behavior of workstation and shared appliances of each occupant in an economical and feasible manner. In particular, we introduce an energy behavior index which quantitatively compares individual occupants’ energy-consuming data to identify high energy consumers and inefficient behaviors. Results from an experiment conducted in an office building equipped with internet of things devices demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach to classify occupants to different energy-usage categories. Our proposed approach along with appropriate behavior-intervention techniques could be used to impact occupant energy-use behaviors.

Wi-Fi networks are currently considered as an efficient and economical tool for occupancy sensing in office buildings. Studies particularly indicated that these networks could be utilized to understand/predict occupants’ energy-use patterns. Despite the value that investigating this possibility could provide for the current research, it has not been well explored how energy-use pattern information could be extracted from Wi-Fi system information. In response, this study utilizes statistical analyses to investigate the correlation of Wi-Fi flows with miscellaneous electric loads (MELs) in office buildings. MELs account for more than one-third of office-building energy consumption and are the best representative of occupants’ energy-use patterns. In the pursuit of the objective, data from two offices were collected over a 3-month period of time. Results from the analyses show that an average 92 percent of MELs energy consumption could be predicted through the Wi-Fi flows in a building. This finding thereby demonstrates that occupants’ energy-use patterns are highly positively correlated to Wi-Fi flows in a building and accordingly, the information of Wi-Fi networks could be utilized to understand/interpret these patterns. This significantly contributes to the current body of research and can be used to support efforts into understanding/enhancing occupants’ energy-use behaviors. In addition, since Wi-Fi networks are a major subset of internet of things (IoT) hardware systems and IoT implementation for intelligent energy management in buildings significantly depends on occupant energy-use patterns, this research helps IoT-based efforts by displaying how these patterns could be extracted from IoT infrastructure.

Providing personalized energy-use information to individual occupants enables the adoption of energy-aware behaviors in commercial buildings. However, the implementation of individualized feedback still remains challenging due to the difficulties in collecting personalized data, tracking personal behaviors, and delivering personalized tailored information to individual occupants. Nowadays, the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are used in a variety of applications including real-time monitoring, control, and decision-making due to the flexibility of these technologies for fusing different data streams. In this paper, we propose a novel IoT-based smartphone energy assistant (iSEA) framework which prompts energy-aware behaviors in commercial buildings. iSEA tracks individual occupants through tracking their smartphones, uses a deep learning approach to identify their energy usage, and delivers personalized tailored feedback to impact their usage. iSEA particularly uses an energy-use efficiency index (EEI) to understand behaviors and categorize them into efficient and inefficient behaviors. The iSEA architecture includes four layers: physical, cloud, service, and communication. The results of implementing iSEA in a commercial building with ten occupants over a twelve-week duration demonstrate the validity of this approach in enhancing individualized energy-use behaviors. An average of 34% energy savings was measured by tracking occupants’ EEI by the end of the experimental period. In addition, the results demonstrate that commercial building occupants often ignore controlling over lighting systems at their departure events that leads to wasting energy during non-working hours. By utilizing the existing IoT devices in commercial buildings, iSEA significantly contributes to support research efforts into sensing and enhancing energy-aware behaviors at minimal costs.

This paper introduces a database of 34 field-measured building occupant behavior datasets collected from 15 countries and 39 institutions across 10 climatic zones covering various building types in both commercial and residential sectors. This is a comprehensive global database about building occupant behavior. The database includes occupancy patterns (i.e., presence and people count) and occupant behaviors (i.e., interactions with devices, equipment, and technical systems in buildings). Brick schema models were developed to represent sensor and room metadata information. The database is publicly available, and a website was created for the public to access, query, and download specific datasets or the whole database interactively. The database can help to advance the knowledge and understanding of realistic occupancy patterns and human-building interactions with building systems (e.g., light switching, set-point changes on thermostats, fans on/off, etc.) and envelopes (e.g., window opening/closing). With these more realistic inputs of occupants' schedules and their interactions with buildings and systems, building designers, energy modelers, and consultants can improve the accuracy of building energy simulation and building load forecasting.