On quantifying building performance adaptability to variable occupancy

Quantifying Adaptability

–Until adaptability can be calculated and measured, it is difficult to understand or promote. This paper defines adaptability and offers a way to measure it based on communications theory. Adaptability is a complex process which requires a number of supporting processes and definitions. The concept of state-pairs is developed and used to describe communicating entities, interfaces, comparison, ...

An Agent-Based Occupancy Simulator for Building Performance Simulation

Traditionally, in building energy modeling (BEM) programs, occupancy inputs are deterministic and less indicative of real world scenarios, contributing to discrepancies between simulated and actual energy use in buildings. This paper presents an agent-based occupancy simulator, which models each occupant as an agent with specified movement events and statistics of space uses. To reduce the amou...

Capacity Building to Improve Hospital Managers’ Performance in West Asia

Improved Occupancy Grids for Map Building

Occupancy grids are a probabilistic method for fusing multiple sensor readings into surface maps of the environment. Although the underlying theory has been understood for many years, the intricacies of applying it to realtime sensor interpretation have been neglected. This paper analyzes how refined sensor models (including specularity models) and assumptions about independence are crucial iss...

A Tool for Characterizing and Quantifying Adaptability and Adaptivity

The need for adaptation can be largely justified today by the increasing use of a large variety of interactive services by the whole population using various computer devices in different technical and social environments. Adaptation can apply to many aspects of software: presentation, data, services or assistance according to many factors like user characteristics, interaction platforms, envir...