CUSTOMIZING THE BEHAVIOR OF INTERACTING OCCUPANTS USING PERSONAS

Abstract

This work introduces personas, descriptions of fictional individuals used in the field of human-computer interac-tion, into the simulation of building performance. The ultimate goal is to reduce the impact of buildings on the environment by helping architects predict the energy de-mand associated with different design options. As energy consumption patterns are largely dependent on human ac-tivities, we previously developed a method to simulate the behavior of individual building occupants. Here we ex-tend the method, allowing occupants to interact with one another. Also, whereas activities generated by the previ-ous method were based on only the recorded schedules of real people, we now use personas as well to customize and diversify occupant behavior. Both occupant interac-tion and behavior customization were achieved via the as-signment of weighting coefficients to activities used for model calibration. Simulation results demonstrate that, by supplying only modest amounts of information, architects may be able to generate plausible interdependent sched-ules specifically tailored to their own projects.