The impact of occupancy resolution on the accuracy of building energy performance simulation

Using Building Performance Simulation (BPS) is nowadays a standard practice in building design, building operation and energy management, model predictive control, fault detection and diagnosis applications. One of the major factors affecting the energy performance of buildings is occupancy. In this study, we analyze the impact of different resolutions of occupancy count profiles on BPS accuracy. These occupancy count profiles are obtained from a large educational building. These profiles includes: (1) whole-building occupancy distributed evenly across building zones, (2) detailed zone-level occupancy estimated from stereo-vision cameras and WiFi sensors. Simulations were carried out using a detailed white-box model implemented in EnergyPlus and validated against ground truth data. A comparison of the ground truth data with obtained simulation results indicate that the increased resolution of occupancy data does not necessarily improve the overall building energy consumption accuracy, but improves only occupancy-related results, e.g. ventilation energy consumption.