Revealing and modelling occupants’ preferences for comfort adaptive actions in open-plan offices with the inclusion of contextual and social-psychological aspects

Office occupants interact dynamically with indoor environment control systems to perform daily routines and to maintain, restore, or enhance their comfort and needs. Traditional surveys and lab studies have been used to identify occupants’ attitudes, behaviours, and the role of demographic characteristics over time or in response to specific environmental conditions. However, there has been limited investigation into how occupants choose different building controls when experiencing multi-modal discomfort, or how social dynamics, e.g., the influence of colleagues, shape such adaptive actions. This study addresses this gap through a survey-based stated choice experiment. The design of the experiment included four types of influential factors: building characteristics, contextual factors, environmental factors, and personal factors. The results show that office employees' preferences for various comfort measures are highly situational and context dependent. Additionally, in open-plan office areas, employees tend to show cooperative intentions, often accepting others' proposals for adaptations and being less likely to seek additional measures. A resulting discrete choice model effectively captures individual preferences through a utility function, enabling detailed modelling of the choice behaviour. This method is also flexible for modelling multiple behaviours and social interactions among office employees.