The human as key element in the assessment and monitoring of the environmental performance of buildings

To further reduce the environmental load future buildings must be much more sustainable than the existing buildings. Currently most decisions about the building sustainability are made by applying sustainability assessment tools. However these tools are not really suited for monitoring the environmental performance of buildings during its whole life cycle. New methods and approaches are necessary to asses and monitor the environmental performance of buildings. Optimizing comfort for occupants and its related energy use is becoming more important for facility managers. Presently however HVAC installations often do not operate effectively and efficiently in practice, because the behaviour of occupants is not included. This result in comfort complains as well as unnecessary high energy consumption. As the end-user influence becomes even more important for the resulting energy consumption of sustainable buildings, the focus should be how to integrate the occupants in the building’s performance control loop. This leads to new approaches which enable the inclusion of occupant’s behaviour in the process control of the building’s performance to help facilities managers operate and maintain their sustainable buildings more efficiently. In an experiment in a real in-use office building a wireless sensor network was applied to describe user behaviour. The results showed that it is possible to capture individual user behaviour and to use this to further optimize comfort in relation to energy consumption. Based on our experiments we could determine the influence of occupants’ behaviour on energy use and determine possible energy reduction by implementing the human-in-the-loop process control strategy.