Occupant’s thermal preference diversity in residential air-conditioning use: A study in Osaka, Japan

Abstract

The diverse occupant's behaviour (OB) has been identified as a significant impact on household air-conditioner (AC) energy use. However, the stochastic feature of occupant's individual preference in AC use is seldom studied due to the limitation of appliance-level energy data. This study aims to analyze the inter-occupant OB diversity based on the monitoring bigdata of AC load in a residential community of 586 households in Osaka, Japan. First, household's thermal preference was quantitatively identified from AC load profiles. Clustering analysis is then employed for labeling and classification of the target households with different thermal preference types. Results show 4 typical behavioral patterns, namely sensitive & active users, sensitive but inactive users, insensitive but active users, insensitive & inactive users, with a share of dwellings in the community of 36%, 31%, 19%, and 14%, respectively. Such household-level benchmarking could provide an informative reference for the modeling and simulation of residential AC usage.