Developing an Integrated Pedestrian Behaviour Model for Office Buildings

Abstract

As an increasing number of people work in office buildings and new sophisticated sensor technologies become available there is, both, a need and potential, to develop more complex building service controls that increase the energy efficiency of buildings as well as the well-being of employees. The data required for the testing and evaluation of such control systems is usually in the form of movements and locations of office building occupants collected over long periods of time. However, such data is generally difficult to obtain for reasons ranging from the need to evaluate un-commissioned buildings to privacy concerns related to data sharing. Therefore, this study develops a pedestrian behaviour model that can simulate office occupants’ movements and locations thereby acting as a research platform that produces data for external applications. The model is integrated as it simulates not only the movements of occupants between different locations in the building but also decisions that drive the movements such as which activities occupants want to carry out throughout the day, and when and where they want to perform these activities. Furthermore, the model is based on the guidelines of (i) flexibility – the model is able to simulate movements in different building plans and represent movement patterns of different organizations; (ii) extensibility – the model uses a modular framework that enables easy adoption of more complex components and integration with other workplace related studies as and when required; and (iii) data parsimony – the model has low and simple data requirements itself.