Quantifying the impact of occupants’ spatial distributions on office buildings energy and comfort performance

Designers typically follow a simplistic approach regarding occupant distribution in building simulation models, such as a uniform distribution. However, this approach rarely reflects reality, as occupants are often distributed heterogeneously in building spaces. To this end, this study develops a methodology to examine the impact of occupant distribution on energy and comfort performance; it then applies the methodology to an office building model in Toronto, Canada. The building energy model was simulated under a set of seventy-five plausible occupants’ distribution scenarios (ODSs). The results indicate that ODSs can have a significant impact on occupants’ comfort as densely populated zones experienced significantly higher discomfort hours per occupant compared to the homogeneous distribution. On the other hand, the variable ODSs had a modest impact on energy performance as the highest difference in energy use intensity was observed to be about 9%, given that the model heating, ventilation, and air conditioning was hard-sized for all simulations. Finally, the benefits of deploying adaptive technologies such as demand-controlled ventilation were assessed in terms of mitigating the impact of variable ODSs.