Development of an Integrated, Personalized Comfort Methodology for Office Buildings

Abstract

Despite the significant progress observed over the last decades, the European building stock still consumes significant amounts of energy (39% of the total final energy), whilst it does not always provide the conditions required for occupants' well-being and thermal comfort sensation. In order to achieve the goal of nearly or even zero energy buildings, a deep refurbishment of the building stock is imperative. As the literature indicates, a firm evaluation of indoor conditions is essential, while having at the epicenter the occupants' comfort perception, with emphasis on their individual characteristics. In this respect, a methodological framework is developed and a preliminary implementation is performed. The main goal of the methodological approach is the consideration of both the classical comfort parameters along with the occupants' socioeconomic and personalized characteristics that affect their perception and can differentiate their needs even under the same conditions. Among other important findings this preliminary implementation achieved some very promising results, highlighting that occupants' individual characteristics such as recycling and exercising can affect the occupants' comfort perception.

Systematic literature review: the nexus of users’ social characteristics to environmental performance mandates in post occupancy evaluation (POE)

“…POE is defined as examining the effectiveness of engrossed design environments for human users (Husin et al , 2018; Osei-Poku, 2016; Stevenson and Rijal, 2010; Vale and Vale, 2010). The objectives of POE include improvement of building design and operations (Khalil and Husin, 2009; Pei et al , 2015; Preiser and Nasar, 2008; Zimring et al , 2007), fine-tuning of the design for comfort and energy efficiency (Gupta and Chandiwala, 2010) as well as improvement of the energy performance of the buildings (Antoniadou and Papadopoulos, 2017). POE is an essential measure to examine a well-performed building by using the occupants' feedback as the evaluation benchmark.…”

“…POE is an essential measure to examine a well-performed building by using the occupants' feedback as the evaluation benchmark. According to Antoniadou and Papadopoulos (2017), analysis of building evaluation and occupants' interaction is appropriate, where detailed analysis of the users' social characteristics has to be further implemented.…”

Building Integrated Shading and Building Applied Photovoltaic System Assessment in the Energy Performance and Thermal Comfort of Office Buildings

“…The implementation of indoor monitoring for the determination of indoor environment conditions is nowadays widely applied, with the researchers focusing on specific thermo physical parameters. Main aspects of indoor monitoring include one or more of the following; air temperature [17,18], relative humidity [19], air velocity [20][21][22][23], globe temperature [24,25], CO 2 concentration levels, lighting and glare conditions, and noise levels [26][27][28][29]. Depending on the type and size of the building, thermal comfort conditions are monitored through the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) and Predicted Percentage of Dissatisfaction (PPD) indexes, for determining the thermal sensation and the percentage of dissatisfaction of the occupants, respectively [30][31][32].…”