A Conceptual Framework for Occupant-Centered Building Management Decision Support System

Buildings’ energy consumption makes the largest portion of the overall energy consumption. Commercial buildings are specific and their energy efficiency should not be viewed as a standalone issue. On the contrary, it needs to be viewed in function of the goals of the hosted businesses and organizations. The critical factor for achieving these goals are employees, who are also usually occupants of these buildings and, thus, hold one of the keys to reduced energy consumption. It has been shown that energy-conscious behaviour of building occupants presents a significant opportunity to save energy. Human behaviour is, however, very complex and hard to predict, and there needs to be a set of conditions satisfied for occupants to cooperate on the energy efficiency level. Majority of commercial buildings’ occupants are not directly affected by their energy-consumption related behaviour due to the non-obvious/-direct incentive to reduce energy use and no access to their levels of consumption. In this paper we present a framework for a building energy management decision support system that is motivated by these findings, and therefore, centres the occupants and motivates them to both achieve business-wise and improve their energy-related behaviour.