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Despite the fact that buildings are designed for occupants in principle, evidence suggests buildings are often uncomfortable compared to the requirements of standards; difficult to control by occupants; and, operated inefficiently with regards to occupants’ preferences and presence. Meanwhile, practitioners –architects, engineers, technology companies, building managers and operators, and policymakers – lack the knowledge, tools, and precedent to design and operate buildings optimally considering the complex and diverse nature of occupants. Building on the success of IEA EBC Annex 66 (“Definition and simulation of occupant behavior in buildings”; 2013–2017), a follow-up IEA EBC Annex 79 (“Occupant-centric building design and operation”; 2018–2023) has been developed to address gaps in knowledge, practice, and technology. Annex 79 involves international researchers from diverse disciplines like engineering, architecture, computer science, psychology, and sociology. Annex 79 and this review paper have four main areas of focus: (1) multi-domain environmental exposure, building interfaces, and human behavior; (2) data-driven occupant modeling strategies and digital tools; (3) occupant-centric building design; and (4) occupant-centric building operation. The objective of this paper is to succinctly report on the leading research of the above topics and articulate the most pressing research needs – planned to be addressed by Annex 79 and beyond.

Occupant behavior is now widely recognized as a major contributing factor to uncertainty of buildingperformance. While a surge of research on the topic has occurred over the past four decades, and particularlythe past few years, there are many gaps in knowledge and limitations to current methodologies.This paper outlines the state-of-the-art research, current obstacles and future needs and directions for thefollowing four-step iterative process: (1) occupant monitoring and data collection, (2) model development,(3) model evaluation, and (4) model implementation into building simulation tools. Major themesinclude the need for greater rigor in experimental methodologies; detailed, honest, and candid reportingof methods and results; and development of an efficient means to implement occupant behavior modelsand integrate them into building energy modeling programs.©

The complex operation of HVAC systems in large commercial buildings warrants regular implementation of advanced analytical approaches to operations and maintenance, and subsequent corrective measures to improve and maintain optimal energy performance. Despite the established capabilities of data-driven fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) to identify suboptimal controls policies and mechanical faults resulting in poor energy performance, few attempts have been made to deploy scalable solutions around these approaches. Furthermore, real-time BAS-integrated FDD methods are predominantly rule-based, offering limited insights to faults with gradual negative impacts to energy performance. This paper demonstrates the application of various established data-driven, inverse-model-based FDD methodologies in a BAS-integrated environment. Traditionally implemented sparingly, the novelty of recursive and automatic execution of advanced FDD methodologies, facilitated through a direct data pipeline to an existing BAS, capitalizes on the BAS's real-time monitoring capabilities to enable continuously refreshed inverse model generation that can capture the gradual degradation of building performance, and provide up-to-date actionable visualizations and key performance indicators (KPI) to building operators. Since deployment, the application has successfully identified a scheduling fault on two separate occasions in a case study building in Ottawa, Canada, and the visualizations were presented to the building operators who resolved the issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]