Influence Of Window Opening And Closing Behaviour and Heating Set-Point Adjustments on Heating Energy Consumption in Dwellings

Energy building simulations are key tools to be used in each design phase of the building . Actually, the ability of building energy simulation programs to evaluate real energy use is undermined by a poor representation of the stochastic variables entering the calculation: among these, the ones relate human interactions with the control of the indoor environment are crucial.One of the reason of the discrepancy between simulated and real energy use in buildings lies in the fact that simulation tools are only able to describe control actions modelling deterministically and following predefined and fixed schedules. Indeed models of human behaviour are generally described by statistical algorithms that predict the probability of an action occurs.. Moreover, building energy simulation programs are not currently able to adequately evaluate different scenarios explaining occupant behaviour’s influence. The efforts described in this paper are defining realistic user profiles to implement in most of the buildings simulation tools. This work mainly focused on the investigation on how different probabilistic user patterns (adjusting thermostat set-point and window opening behaviour) influenced energy consumption with the aim to compare the obtained results with a regular use of the simulation program. Models of human behaviour based on measurements were implemented and simulations results given as probabilistic distribution of values of energy consumption were calculated, depending on different levels of users’ behavior