Towards a Rigorous Consideration of Occupant Behaviours of Residential Households for Effective Electrical Energy Savings: An Overview

Salah Bouktif, Ali Ouni and Sanja Lazarova-Molnar
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Salah Bouktif: Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, UAE University, Al Ain 15551, United Arab Emirates
Ali Ouni: Department of Software Engineering and IT École de Technologie Supérieure, University of Quebec, Montreal, QC H3C 1K3, Canada
Sanja Lazarova-Molnar: Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense, Denmark

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 5, 1-30

Abstract: There are two primary ways to save energy within a building: (1) through improving building engineering structures and adopting efficient appliance ownership, and (2) through changing occupants’ energy-consuming behaviors. Unfortunately the second way suffers from many challenges and limitations. Occupant behavior is, indeed, a complex and multi-disciplinary concept depending on several human factors. Although its importance is recognized by the energy management community, it is often oversimplified and naively defined when used to study, analyze or model energy load. This paper aims at promoting the definition of occupant behavior as well as exploring the extent to which the latter is involved in research works, targeting directly or indirectly energy savings. Hence, in this work, we propose an overview of interdisciplinary research approaches that consider occupants’ energy-saving behaviors, while we present the big picture and evaluate how occupant behavior is defined, we also propose a categorization of the major works that consider energy-consuming occupant behavior. Our findings via a literature review methodology, based on a bibliometric study, reveal a growth of the number of research works involving occupant behavior to model load forecasting and household segmentation. We have equally identified a research trend showing an increasing interest in studying how to successfully change occupant behaviors towards energy saving.

Keywords: occupant behavior; household; residential building; household classification; load forecasting; energy savings (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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