Customizing the Behavior of Interacting Occupants Using Personas

This work introduces personas, descriptions of fictional individuals used in the field of human-computer interaction, 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 demand associated with different design options. As energy consumption patterns are largely dependent on human activities, we previously developed a method to simulate the behavior of individual building occupants. Here we extend the method, allowing occupants to interact with one another. Also, whereas activities generated by the previous 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 interaction and behavior customization were achieved via the assignment 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 schedules specifically tailored to their own projects.