IAQVEC 2016, 9th International Conference on Indoor Air Quality Ventilation & Energy Conservation In Buildings

Impacts of occupant behaviour on energy performance benchmarking for

residential buildings
Jun Li, Zhun (Jerry) Yu*, Yujian Huang and Guoqiang Zhang
College of Civil Engineering, National Center for International Research Collaboration in
Building Safety and Environment, Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan 410082, China
*

Corresponding email: jerryzhuny@hotmail.com

ABSTRACT
Existing benchmarking methods for residential building energy performance tend to ignore
the impact of occupant behaviour. The aim of this study is to investigate whether and how
occupant behaviour has an impact on building energy performance benchmarking. To achieve
this aim, energy performance data and relevant information were first collected from 23
residential buildings in Japan. Then, by using grey relational analysis and a data mining
technique, i.e. cluster analysis, these buildings were classified into different clusters based on
influential factors unrelated to occupant behaviour. After that, benchmarking values for each
cluster were identified and compared with each other. At last, occupant behavior in each
cluster was analysed to provide insights into its impact on benchmarking. The results show
that, although the influence of all factors unrelated to occupant behaviour is identical in each
cluster, occupant behaviour still leads to a great variation among energy consumption of
different buildings, thereby resulting in significantly varied benchmarking values of different
clusters. This indicates that, similar to other factors, occupant behaviour also has a great
impact on benchmarking process. Moreover, different occupant behaviour has different
impacts in each cluster and between clusters. It is thus highlighted that future research on
benchmarking should put more effort into developing a more reliable and systematic method
with different factors being considered, especially occupant behaviour.
KEYWORDS
Occupant behaviour; Energy performance; Benchmarking; Residential building; Data mining
1 INTRODUCTION
Residential building energy benchmarking is the process of comparing energy performance
between buildings with similar characteristics, or comparing the performance of a building to
its previous performance. It plays an important role in identifying energy-inefficient buildings
for building retrofitting and in helping building owners and operators to evaluate the energysaving potential of buildings. Due to the complex and diverse characteristics of buildings,
conducting a reliable and systematic comparative analysis is critical for the success of
benchmarking process (Prez-Lombard et al. 2009). Thus, much research effort recently has
been put into establishing a comprehensive and effective method that could account for
various influencing factors. For example, different models, such as regression-based
models(Chung 2011, Chung, Hui and Lam 2006), artificial neural network (ANN) models
(Yalcintas and Aytun Ozturk 2007) and data mining-based models (Gao and Malkawi 2014)
have been proposed for building energy performance benchmarking. Although buildingrelated parameters and weather conditions have been considered in these studies, there still
remained a few challenges to be met due mainly to the complexity of influencing factors of
the building energy consumption. In particular, occupant behaviour, a significant influencing

factor on residential building energy consumption, is usually ignored while whether and how
it impacts on building energy consumption and performance benchmarking are still poorly
understood. To address this issue, we developed a new methodology for energy performance
benchmarking and applied it to collected data. Based on the benchmarking results and
collected data, the influence of occupant behaviour on building energy consumption and
performance benchmarking was analysed. The ultimate goal is to provide in-depth and useful
information of occupant behaviour for further benchmarking modelling.
2 Methodology
A new methodology for residential building energy performance benchmarking is developed,
as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The proposed benchmarking method

The methodology consists of five steps and each step is described as follows.
Step 1 Data collection and database development. To establish a database, energy
performance data and relevant information in a number of residential buildings need to be
measured and collected, including: 1) Basic information like building areas, building types,
number of occupants, etc.; 2) Influential factors like weather parameters; 3) Detailed end-use
data such as heating and cooling, hot water supply, etc.; 4) Other information like
electricity/gas bill.
Step 2 Data pre-processing. The major tasks of data pre-processing include: 1) Removal of
outliers and noise data to improve data quality; 2) Transformation of data into appropriate
forms for further analysis. Nominal data can be directly transformed (e.g., [detached house,
apartment] can be transformed into [0, 1] for building types). For numerical data, min-max
normalization is performed to transform them into a predetermined range [0, 1]. Specifically,
a value xi is normalized to xi' by computing
xi'

xi xmin
xmax xmin

Where xmin and xmax are the minimum and maximum value, respectively.

(1)

Step 3 Analysis of different factors. Grey relation analysis (GRA) is used to analyse the
relationship between building energy consumption (the objective factor) and different
influential factors (compared factors). Grey relational grade is used to describe the
relationship among the factors and further determine the factors that significantly impact the
building energy consumption. The grey relation grade is calculated by using the following
formula (Fu et al. 2001):

i (k )

min min y0 (k ) yi (k ) max max y0 (k ) yi (k )

i

( y o , yi )

y0 (k ) yi (k ) max max y0 (k ) yi (k )

(2)

1 n
i (k )
n k 1

(3)

Where [0,1] , distinguishing coefficient, usually 0.5 ; yo and yi are objective

sequence and compared sequences respectively.
In addition, due to the contribution of different parameters differs considerably, grey
relational grade of each factor is defined as its corresponding weight coefficients.

Step 4 Building classification. Cluster analysis is used for classification due to its robust
function of discovering previously unknown groups based on similarity measure. In our
previous study (Yu et al. 2011), we divided the influential factors of residential building
energy consumption into two categories: either related or un-related to occupant behavior. In
this step, k-means cluster algorithm is employed to perform cluster analysis based on factors
unrelated to occupant behavior, thus achieving the goal of classifying buildings into different
clusters, where buildings within the same cluster share strong similar characteristics but are
dissimilar to buildings in other clusters. The similarity and dissimilarity could be calculated
based on a distance measure, as shown in equation (4) and (5).

d (i, j ) ( xi1 x j1 ) 2 ( xi 2 x j 2 ) 2 ( xim x jm ) 2

(4)

Emin d ( p, ci ) 2

(5)

i 1 pCi

Where i=(xi1, xi2, , xim) and j =xj1, xj2, , xjmare buildings. xi1, , xim are n parameters
of i and xj1, , xjm are n parameters of j.

Step 5 Benchmark identification.

Accumulative frequency distribution analysis is used to obtain the benchmarking value for
each cluster. The percentage to determine the benchmarking value is usually set to be 50%
(Farrou, Kolokotroni and Santamouris 2012).
3 CASE STUDY

3.1 Database and case buildings

For demonstration purpose, the following data from 23 residential buildings in Japan (S.
Murakami et al.), located in Hokkaido and Tohoku, were collected and used for benchmark
identification:
Daily/monthly end-use data for a complete year (2002-2003) associating with eight
categories of occupant behaviour, i.e. heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC), hot
water supply (HWS), lighting (LIG), kitchen (KIT), refrigerator (REF), entertainment and
information (E&I), housework and sanitary (H&S and others (OTH).
Representative parameters unrelated to occupant behavior, including: 1) time-dependent:
outdoor air temperature (T), relative humidity (RH), wind speed (WS), solar radiation (RA); 2)
time-independent: house type (HT), building area, equivalent leakage area (ELA), heat loss
coefficient (HLC), number of occupants (NO), construction (CON), equipment type space
heating and cooling equipment (HCE), hot water supply equipment (HWSE), kitchen
equipment (KE)
Weather data from 2002 to 2003 in Japan
3.2 Benchmarking results
3.2.1 Grey relational analysis
Table 1 Grey relational grades for different factors
District
T
WS
RH
RA
NO
HLC ELA
HT
CON HCE HWSE KE
Hokkaido 0.799 0.646 0.652 0.676
0.700 0.712 0.671 0.639 0.549 0.530 0.555 0.583
Tohoku 0.835 0.636 0.735 0.708

Table 1 shows the results of grey relational grades of the twelve representative parameters.
For the four time-dependent variables, temperature has the greatest impact on energy
consumption in both two districts while a stronger effect can be seen in Tohuku. For the eight
time-independent variables, heat loss coefficient, number of occupants and equivalent leakage
area show obvious influence on building energy consumption. Furthermore, as mentioned
previously, the grey relational grades are treated as weights assigned to each parameter in
order to reflect the significance of each attributes.
3.2.2 Cluster analysis
Considering the limited size of the database, the buildings were classified into three clusters
and the results of cluster analysis are shown in Table 2. Note that cluster centroids represent
the mean value for each dimension and are normally used to characterize the clusters.
From Table 2, it can be seen that Cluster 1 is a bunch of buildings representing high number
of occupants (the cluster centroid of NO in this cluster is 0.3498, which is higher than that in
the other two clusters), detached houses (the cluster centroid of HT in this cluster is 0,
indicating that all the buildings in this cluster are detached house), electrical hot water
supplies and kitchen equipment, etc. The other clusters can be explained similarly. After
cluster analysis based on the twelve factors unrelated to occupant behavior, it can be inferred
that these factors have the most similar influence on the building energy consumption and
benchmark identification in the same cluster, while the influence differs considerably in
different clusters.

Table 2 Centroid of each cluster

Attribute
T
WS
RH
RA
NO
HLC
ELA
HT
CON
HCE
HWSE
KE
Clustered instances
and proportion

cluster 1
0.4585
0.3356
0.4082
0.4023
0.3498
0.0877
0.0300
0.0000
0.0915
0.0000
0.0000
0.0000

cluster 2
0.7161
0.2676
0.4490
0.1180
0.2332
0.1386
0.0519
0.3197
0.3661
0.4417
0.5549
0.4859

cluster 3
0.2619
0.4667
0.0000
0.6757
0.1908
0.0983
0.0293
0.2325
0.4493
0.5300
0.5549
0.2650

Full Data
0.4317
0.3806
0.2236
0.4589
0.2434
0.1060
0.0354
0.1946
0.3343
0.3687
0.4101
0.2535

6(26%)

6(26%)

11(48%)

23(100%)

3.2.3 Benchmarking value

Table 3 Benchmarking value for each cluster
50%
AVERAGE

cluster 1
524
513

cluster 2
690
620

cluster 3
312
418

Benchmarking value and average value of building energy consumption in each cluster are
counted and shown in Table 3. Both of them vary significantly among the three clusters.
further data analysis shows that in each cluster building energy consumption also varies
significantly among different buildings. This indicates that, although the influence of all
factors unrelated to occupant behaviour is identical in each cluster, occupant behaviour still
leads to a great variation among energy consumption of different buildings, thereby resulting
in significantly varied benchmarking values of different clusters. In this view, it can be
inferred that the neglect of the impact of occupant behaviour might result in poor and
superficial benchmarking. Such benchmarking might even lead to adverse influence on
energy retrofitting in practice. Therefore, future research on benchmarking should put more
effort into developing a more reliable and systematic method with different factors being
considered, especially occupant behaviour.
4 ANALYSIS OF OCCUPANT BEHAVIOR
This section analyses and discusses the impact of occupant behaviour on building energy
consumption based on annual, monthly and daily end-use load data. The aim is to provide indepth and useful information of occupant behaviour for further benchmarking modelling.
4.1 Annual variation

Figure 2 Annual variation of end-use loads

Figure 2 shows the annual variations of eight main end-use loads associating with various
occupant behavior in each cluster, which is normalized by the corresponding average value of
all sample buildings in the cluster. It can be seen that each end-use load spreads over a wide
range in the three clusters, which implies that the influence of occupant behavior is different
among the three building groups and a fairly large energy-saving potential might be realized
by improving occupant behavior. Furthermore, occupant behavior associating with OTHER in
Cluster 1 and 2, H&S in Cluster 3 deserves extra attention due to their significant variation.
4.2 Monthly variations

a) Case building 1

b) Case building 2

Figure 3. Monthly end-use loads of two case buildings

The stacked-column of eight main end-use monthly loads of two case buildings (case building
1 and case building 2 with the maximum and minimum annual EUI respectively in cluster1) is
shown in Figure 3. It can be seen that the end-use loads of the two buildings is significantly
different despite these two buildings have very similar characteristics in terms of factors
unrelated to occupant behavior, and the monthly discrepancy in these end-use loads varies
differently between them. This implies that, during benchmarking processes, buildings should
be classified based on factors both unrelated and related to occupant behaviour.

4.3 Daily variation

a) HVAC

b) HWS

Figure 4. Boxplot of normalized daily HVAC and HWS load in case building 1
Among different end-use loads, both a weather-dependent load, i.e. HVAC load, and a nonweather-dependent load, i.e. HWS load, in Case building 1 are selected and used to
demonstrate the daily variation. Figure 4 presents the boxplot of normalized daily HVAC and
HWS loads. As shown in Figure 4, the variability in HVAC load, caused by corresponding
activities, ranges from close to zero to about 3.4 times upon average value, while it ranges
from 0.2 to about 2.2 in terms of HWS load. This implies that occupants in Case building 1
have significant daily variations in behaviour associating with HVAC and HWS. Therefore,
occupant behaviour associating with both weather-dependent loads and non-weatherdependent loads should be considered during a benchmarking process. In addition, as shown
in Figure 4, the range of HWS load exceeds 1.5 among all months, while there are only six
months in which the range of HVAC exceeds 1.5. This implies that the way to deal with these
two categories of behaviour should be different in terms of weather conditions.
5 CONCLUSIONS
This study investigated the influence of occupant behaviour on residential building energy
consumption and performance benchmarking. The ultimate goal is to provide in-depth
information for further benchmarking modelling. A new benchmarking method based on grey
relational analysis and cluster analysis has been developed, and it was applied to 23
residential buildings in Japan. Based on the benchmarking results and collected data, the
influence of occupant behaviour on building energy consumption and performance
benchmarking was analysed. The results show that although the influence of all factors
unrelated to occupant behaviour is identical in each cluster, occupant behaviour still leads to a
great variation among energy consumption of different buildings, thereby resulting in
significantly varied benchmarking values of different clusters. Moreover, occupant behavior
varies greatly in each cluster and between different clusters. Such variability needs to be
considered in a benchmarking process. Future studies should focus on developing a more
reliable and systematic method with different factors being considered, especially occupant
behaviour
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(No. 51408205), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and Hunan
Provincial Science and Technology Major Project of China (No. 2011FJ1007).

REFERENCES
Chung, W. (2011) Review of building energy-use performance benchmarking methodologies.
Applied Energy, 88, 1470-1479.
Chung, W., Y. V. Hui & Y. M. Lam (2006) Benchmarking the energy efficiency of
commercial buildings. Applied Energy, 83, 1-14.
Farrou, I., M. Kolokotroni & M. Santamouris (2012) A method for energy classification of
hotels: A case-study of Greece. Energy and Buildings, 55, 553-562.
Fu, C., J. Zheng, J. Zhao & W. Xu (2001) Application of grey relational analysis for corrosion
failure of oil tubes. Corrosion Science, 43, 881-889.
Gao, X. & A. Malkawi (2014) A new methodology for building energy performance
benchmarking: An approach based on intelligent clustering algorithm. Energy and
Buildings, 84, 607-616.
Prez-Lombard, L., J. Ortiz, R. Gonzlez & I. R. Maestre (2009) A review of benchmarking,
rating and labelling concepts within the framework of building energy certification
schemes. Energy and Buildings, 41, 272-278.
Yalcintas, M. & U. Aytun Ozturk (2007) An energy benchmarking model based on artificial
neural network method utilizing US Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption
Survey (CBECS) database. International Journal of Energy Research, 31, 412-421.
Yu, Z., B. C. M. Fung, F. Haghighat, H. Yoshino & E. Morofsky (2011) A systematic
procedure to study the influence of occupant behavior on building energy
consumption. Energy and Buildings, 43, 1409-1417.
S. Murakami, S. Akabayashi, T. Inoue, H. Yoshino, K. Hasegawa, K. Yuasa, T. Ikaga.
Energy consumption for residential buildings in Japan, Architectural Institute of Japan,
Maruzen Corp., 2006 (http://tkkankyo.eng.niigatau.ac.jp/HP/HP/database/index.htm).