The impacts of occupant behavior on building energy consumption: A review

Three main categories of occupant behaviors were summarized for building through this literature review, including the occupancy, interactions and behavioral efficiency. The results of the review confirmed that the actual occupancy and the interactions with buildings are the key influencing factors determining the energy building consumption. Behavioral efficiency has been identified as an efficient and economical method compared with retrofitting technologies. But, categorizing and quantifying the behavioral inputs as well as the validations are needed to be improved in the future. Window opening behavior has been seldom taken into account when calculates the energy impact because window opening behavior is rare in most of the centrally air-conditioned buildings. Also, the energy impacts of genders are not as much as engineering significance in energy consumption, but they are important for understanding the variation of the personal and other environmental control. The results are important to identify the key factors and address the determining considerations from those factors, in order to avoid unnecessary and redundant data collection. That is also significant to the energy simulation and the development of software packages in future work.