Where Your People At? One Size Occupancy Scheduling Doesn’t Fit All

Occupancy plays a key role in the amount of energy used in a building, whether through direct occupant actions or equipment. Building occupancy schedules help to model human behavior, but static schedules fail to represent the increase in remote work since 2020. But how can we accurately model building occupancy changes throughout the day and year? Hear about and discuss these topics and more at our upcoming summer IBPSA-Mixa talk on building occupancy. Three speakers will discuss their work, and then we’ll open to questions and discussion.

Bae, Yeonjin will talk about a single standard occupancy schedule cannot adequately represent all buildings—particularly college buildings, which include diverse space types within one structure. A simple yet scalable data-driven approach will be introduced, leveraging class reservation data from U.S. universities to generate realistic, space-specific occupancy schedules. The resulting patterns reveal how college buildings differ from typical school buildings from a building energy modeling perspective.

Jeetika Malik will present work on occupant modeling under the international project- IEA-EBC Annex 79. Level-of-Detail (LoD) framework to address how we can model dynamic occupancy patterns across days, seasons, and building types, offering a tiered approach to representing occupancy with varying degrees of behavioral, temporal, and spatial resolution.

Yiting Yang’s research introduces a level-of-detail framework for occupancy modeling in urban building energy modeling that helps researchers select suitable approaches based on project requirements and data availability. Validation through an Arizona case study confirms its ability to inform occupancy modeling choices while balancing complexity with implementation practicality.