This event has been postponed. It will be rescheduled for the summer term.

As part of the Energy Futures Lab Lunchtime Seminar Series, Heather Hou, a second-year PhD student in the Urban Systems Lab and the Centre for Transport Studies in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will present her research on the use of urban data to enhance occupant-centric building energy modelling.

Abstract

Building occupancy, which reflects occupant presence, movements and activities within the building space, is a key factor to consider in building energy modelling and simulation. Characterising complex occupant behaviours and their determinants, both within and outside the building space, poses challenges from sensing, modelling, interpretation and prediction perspectives. Past studies typically applied time-dependent models to predict regular occupancy patterns for commercial buildings. However, this prevalent reliance on purely time-of-day is typically not sufficient to accurately characterise the complex occupancy patterns as those may vary with conditions surrounding the building, i.e. the urban environment. Such conditions can be natural (weather, local topology) as well as related to urban systems, including conditions on transport network, presence of events or local regulations. Therefore, this research proposes a conceptual framework concerning interactions between urban systems and building occupancy. Under the framework, we propose a novel modelling framework relying on competing risk hazard formulation to analyse building occupancy of the Imperial College Faculty Building. The building occupancy profiles were inferred from the Wi-Fi connection logs extracted from the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure.

Biography:

Heather/Huiqiao Hou is a second-year PhD student in the Urban Systems Lab and the Centre for Transport studies in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her research focuses on exploring the use of urban data to enhance occupant-centric building energy modelling and to understand urban impacts on building occupancy and building energy consumption. Her PhD research is funded by the CSC Imperial Scholarship. She holds an MSc in transport with Distinction from Imperial College London and a BEng degree in Civil Engineering with First Class from the University of Nottingham. 

This event has been postponed. It will be rescheduled for the summer term.