Commercial Buildings Energy Performance within Context
Occupants in Spotlight
Sanja Lazarova-Molnar, Mikkel Baun Kjærgaard, Hamid Reza Shaker and Bo Nørregaard Jørgensen
Center for Energy Informatics, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, Odense, Denmark
Keywords: Energy Efficiency, Building Performance, Commercial Buildings, Occupants Involvement, Human Factors.
Abstract: Existing commercial buildings represent a challenge in the energy efficiency domain. Energy efficiency of a
building, very often equalized to a building’s performance should not be observed as a standalone issue. For
commercial buildings, energy efficiency needs to be observed and assessed within the context of
performance of resident businesses. We examine both business performance and energy performance and
how they relate to one another to conclude that building occupants, who are also employees, hold the key to
optimizing both metrics in one of the most cost-efficient ways. Finally, the goal of our contribution is
twofold: 1) to re-scope the concept of building performance to and show the importance to consider, hand-
in-hand, both energy performance and performance of resident businesses, and 2) re-state the importance of
the potential that lies in the active involvement of building occupants in optimizing overall building
performance.
1 INTRODUCTION
Energy efficiency is becoming an increasingly
critical issue and one of the most significant cost
factors of existing buildings (Costa et al. 2013; Ma
et al. 2012). It is also as a very complex issue
because it is affected by a number of factors of
various natures (Danov et al. 2013), such as
environment, building structure and materials,
occupants’ behavior, etc. Energy efficiency is,
however, only one of the factors that contributes to
the overall building performance and has to be
viewed within the context of a given building.
Building performance is very often defined and
understood in terms of its energy performance
(Schlueter and Thesseling 2009). However, in one of
the very early works on this topic, it has been clearly
pointed out that building performance needs to be
assessed as “building’s ability to contribute to
fulfilling the functions of its intended use” (Douglas
1996). This implies that there is a lot more to
building performance than the energy performance,
and that the energy performance has to be observed
within the context of a building’s function and
purpose. Commercial buildings typically host
businesses or organizations that have various
business performance goals, whose rate of success
depends to a great extent on employees, i.e. building
occupants. Building occupants at the same time hold
the key to one of the most cost-efficient ways of
enhancing energy performance of existing buildings,
i.e. through exhibiting a more energy-conscious
behaviour. The problem here is that occupants are
not usually motivated to behave in an energy-
conscious way due to the non-existing financial
incentive to reduce energy use and no access to their
levels of consumption. Moreover, energy
management of a building can also affect
employees’ productivity both positively or
negatively. Therefore, we believe that by developing
building energy management systems (BEMS) that
focus on building occupants and their active
participation with a purpose to increase occupants’
contentment levels, in a synergetic way could
enhance the overall building performance.
In the following we provide more insight in
assessment of buildings’ energy performance, as
well the links among building energy performance,
building occupants and business performances of
hosted businesses.
There are a great number of information and
communication technology (ICT) methods and tools
that aim to predict and benchmark energy
performance of buildings (De Wilde 2014) using
simulation or artificial intelligence methods. In spite
of these advances, until now, we have not been able
306
Lazarova-Molnar S., Baun Kjærgaard M., Reza Shaker H. and Nørregaard Jørgensen B..
Commercial Buildings Energy Performance within Context - Occupants in Spotlight.
DOI: 10.5220/0005495203060312
In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems (SMARTGREENS-2015), pages 306-312
ISBN: 978-989-758-105-2
Copyright
c
2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
to identify tools that target and consider the
performance of residential businesses as part of the
overall building performance (Schlueter and
Thesseling 2009; Attia et al. 2013), except for a few
limited attempts (Iyer et al. 2013). We, however,
believe that the only appropriate way to assess
energy savings is to observe them within the context
of the performance of residential businesses.
Therefore, the goal of our contribution is to re-
scope (or scope back) the notion of building
performance, such as to also encompass business
climate and performance of hosted businesses,
besides energy performance. We believe that both
should be observed hand in hand. This would
ultimately imply that a great focus and consideration
needs to be given to building occupants and value
the potential that lies in them for reaching both
targets in a synergetic manner; thus, observing the
energy-efficiency paradigm through the prism of
buildings’ purpose and buildings’ occupants (Jain,
Taylor, and Culligan 2013). Our motivation stems
from the following three facts:
1) Occupants’ behavior can significantly
affect the energy efficiency of existing buildings
(Masoso and Grobler 2010; Azar and Menassa
2011),
2) Energy performance of a building is only
one aspect of the overall building performance
(Douglas 1996), and
3) Buildings are ultimately there to serve
their occupants, both in terms of people and
organizations / businesses (Andrews et al. 2011;
Kamaruzzaman and Sabrani 2011; Armitage and
Murugan 2013).
Figure 1: Influence diagram of occupants behavior, energy
performance, business performance and energy
management.
The concept of having contented occupants only
gains in importance when focusing on commercial
buildings, for the reason that these buildings are also
supposed to provide a productive ambient, i.e. an
ambient in which occupants will feel taken care of
and motivated to accomplish their work goals.
In Figure 1 we present an influence diagram of
energy performance and business performance of
commercial buildings. The diagram shows that the
influence goes in almost all directions. The way that
occupants behave affects the energy performance of
a building, as well as the building energy
management. However, building energy
management also affects behavior of occupants, and
includes the complex behavior that can occur due to
feelings of not being taken care of or being ignored,
e.g., frustration. This, in turn, can negatively impact
productivity, i.e. the business climate in the building,
and, thus, imply a loss in profit or inability to meet
business goals. To further aggravate the problem,
commercial buildings occupants are currently not
directly affected by their energy-consuming
behavior, as they have no financial incentive to
reduce energy use and no access to their levels of
consumption.
Figure 2: Possible effect of retrofits that could have
dramatic impact on business productivity.
Figure 2 further illustrates our motivation where we
present one possible outcome scenario of a retrofit.
In this example, the retrofit greatly enhances
building energy performance, however, it also
makes occupants miserable and results in low
productivity. Certainly, this “gain” is not really a
gain, as resident businesses would be impaired by it.
One could imagine a long list of potential
consequences that would ultimately affect
productivity, including employees consistently
preferring to work at home if that is an option
(which would again save energy, but could be
damaging to productivity). To prevent this, we aim
to more holistically assess a building’s performance,
and use this benchmark in selecting an optimal
retrofit for a given case.
The implications of our position could be
research directions that closely focus on the potential
that lies in the active involvement of occupants,
unlike the majority of current research that treats
occupants as dynamic elements that are only to be
CommercialBuildingsEnergyPerformancewithinContext-OccupantsinSpotlight
307
observed and whose behavior needs to be predicted.
In most of the approaches they are shown only as
observed elements, and almost never as actively
interacting elements (Yu et al. 2011; Azar and
Menassa 2011). This implies that BEMS that
supports the overall building performance need to
communicate with occupants in a bi-directional
user-friendly manner and maintain their contentment
level, thereby maximizing meeting of two goals:
business performance and energy performance.
Therefore, to sum it up, the goal of this paper is
the following:
to re-scope the concept of building performance to
include both building energy performance and
business performance of residential businesses, and
show the importance of actively involving occupants
and placing occupants in the center of building
management in order to utilize their full potential to
increase the overall building performance.
The position that we present is based on findings
from research performed in the areas of energy
management of buildings, human factors in
buildings energy management, as well as the effect
of workplace on productivity, as presented in the
following section.
The paper is structured as follows. In Section 2,
we review the popular definitions of building
performance and we explore the current state-of-the-
art for the two related problem domains: human
factors in building management, and workplace
impact on productivity. We utilize the advances and
findings in these areas as inspiration and basis to
develop our position that we thoroughly present and
assess in Section 3. In Section 4 we discuss the
potential outcomes of our position. Finally, in
Section 5 we conclude the paper.
2 STATE OF THE ART
In line with our presented position, buildings energy
management systems need, besides other technical
aspects, to significantly consider the contentment
level of building occupants and provide them with a
perception that their comfort is important. The
ultimate goal of this is to maximize performance of
residential businesses and organizations. To better
understand this issue, in the following we provide an
overview of the state-of-the-art of the importance of
human factors in the energy performance of
buildings, as well as the impact of the workplace on
productivity. This section serves as an inspiration
and basis for our presented view and position.
2.1 Building Performance
The concept of “building performance” has been
defined throughout literature differently. Here, we
would like to summarize the most popular ones.
Therefore, the most pronounced definitions that we
have encountered are the following:
“we define building performance as related to
energy consumption, the most important issue
concerning CO
2
emissions” (Schlueter and
Thesseling 2009), which is the most common
way of understanding the term (Soebarto and
Williamson 2001; Cohen et al. 2001), and
“define building performance as an
expression of measurable variables which
affect a process or procedure. Common
building performance factors are
environmental factors, such as solar gain,
aerodynamics, and heat loss, structural factors
such as load and stress, and social factors
such as view and privacy.” (Tang et al. 2012)
In other words, most of the existing and recently
used definitions of building performance focus on
technical aspects of buildings, dominantly on the
energy consumption. Very rarely the context of a
building is taken into account when assessing energy
performance, and yet the term building performance
is used. In the following we review the human
factors in management of buildings, in which we
also provide an overview of the modes in which
occupants can be involved in building management.
2.2 Human Factors in Buildings
Management
Humans are the reason why buildings exist. In
commercial buildings the comfort of occupants only
gains in importance, as these buildings need to also
support productivity. Apparently, some of these
aspects can only be tackled during the design phase.
Therefore, there has been a vast amount of research
on the effect of materials, lighting, furnishing, space
management, etc. on the productivity of employees
(Hedge, SIMS JR, and Becker 1995; Fisk 2000;
Veitch and Galasiu 2012). A significant amount of
research has also focused on the effect of materials
that are being used (Berge 2009).
As our focus is on existing commercial
buildings, we are interested in the way that energy
management can affect occupants, and how it can in
turn affect the business performance. Therefore, we
are interested in the modes of communication with
occupants to develop cooperative energy-conscious
behavior. Some of the most significant ways we
SMARTGREENS2015-4thInternationalConferenceonSmartCitiesandGreenICTSystems
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have encountered in research literature are feedback
and education (Arbuthnott 2009; Zografakis,
Menegaki, and Tsagarakis 2008), whereby we place
our attention on feedback as that represents an
opportunity to actively involve occupants. It has also
been noted that occupants’ behavior changes have
the potential to achieve about 25% energy use
reduction (Ehrhardt-Martinez and Laitner 2010),
which is a very significant saving.
An active communication with occupants can
enhance the awareness of their energy-related
behavior. In the work presented in (Carrico and
Riemer 2011), the authors evaluate the group-level
feedback on energy consumption and peer education
and information dissemination. With the two simple
measures they achieved 4% and 7% reduction in
energy consumption. In the work presented in (Hall
2014) the authors present a tool to assist building
stakeholders identify key energy performance issues
with their buildings. The tool explores 5 key areas in
buildings that influence energy performance: design
elements, building management, occupant
experience, agreements and culture and indoor
environment quality. The authors conclude, among
other things, that occupant feedback needs to be
harnessed more in building rating tools, as it is a
major factor to support sustainability of buildings.
The existing work in this domain shows how
significant it is to actively communicate with the
building occupants. It confirms the importance of
feedback and the different types of visualization of
feedback, and this needs to be utilized to enhance
the communication loop with building occupants.
Furthermore, we believe that explanation is also
very important to keep occupants content and make
them feel important. It can be especially helpful
when unpopular measures need to be taken.
Ultimately, communication with occupants needs to
be customized, as there is nothing like “one size fits
all” approach.
2.3 Workplace Impact on Productivity
There have been numerous studies that assess the
impact of the workplace ambient on productivity. In
one of the most recent works (Leblebici 2012) an
analysis of working environment of a foreign private
bank in Turkey is presented and the relationship
between the workplace physical conditions and
employees’ productivity is examined. They conclude
that the overall workplace environment significantly
impacts employees’ performance. In a similar study
(Akimoto et al. 2010), the thermal comfort was
being observed, and it was found that there is a tight
link between employee’s behavior, his/her thermal
comfort and productivity.
Air quality is also seen as a significant factor to
productivity, and it has been shown that poor indoor
air quality can significantly decrease productivity,
apparently to the size of 6-9 % (Wyon 2004). Many
studies go even further and claim an average
relationship of 2% decrement in work performance
per degree
o
C when the temperature is above 25
o
C
(Seppanen, Fisk, and Faulkner 2004). In the same
work, the study performed showed that the
productivity increase by using night-time fans
during work was 32 to 120 times greater than the
cost of energy to run the fans. Therefore, it is
evident that there is a strong link between workplace
ambient and employees’ productivity, and energy
consumption savings have to be viewed in light of
utilizing this connection.
3 CHALLENGE AND RESEARCH
DIRECTIONS
As previously emphasized, energy consumption
represents only a portion of the overall performance
of a building. Buildings have various purposes, and
when considering commercial buildings, which
typically host businesses, one should be very careful
about the trade-offs that could occur when
optimizing building’s energy performance. If
building enhancements for improved energy
efficiency create unhappy occupants, then the energy
savings are meaningless and, even worse, damaging.
This illustrates that occupants are a very significant
parameter in this equation. The fact that buildings’
occupants also represent the most cost-efficient
solution to reducing the energy consumption of a
building only points out that the equation is far from
trivial, and needs to be carefully analyzed from all
perspectives.
The question that is typically addressed is the
following:
“What modifications to perform on an existing
building such that its energy performance is
optimal?”
There are a plentitude of ICT methods that predict
buildings’ energy performance, based on various
assumptions and parameters. These are utilized to
assess suggested building modifications. There are
also methods that consider occupants’ behavior,
albeit only observing and modeling them.
We suggest that the basic question is changed to
the following:
CommercialBuildingsEnergyPerformancewithinContext-OccupantsinSpotlight
309
“What modifications to perform on an existing
building such that its energy performance is optimal
and it stimulates (or at least does not negatively
impact) residential businesses?”
This, certainly, would affect the calculations and
prediction models, and one of the major implications
of it would be focusing on occupants and exhibiting
more care for them. With this shift of focus we wish
to see building occupants being given a more active
role and building BEMS with primary focus on
occupants’ comfort.
A significant implication of this revised view of
building performance would be development of
measures and benchmarking methods to assess
buildings’ performance within a given context, i.e.
in terms of meeting business performance goals.
This would also imply that different types of
buildings would need different benchmarking
measures, as schools, supermarkets or office
buildings would definitely need different ways of
assessing their overall building performance.
4 POTENTIAL OUTCOMES AND
IMPLICATIONS
Our presented position suggests viewing energy
performance of buildings within the actual context
of each and every building, i.e. within performance
goals of hosted businesses and organizations. This,
furthermore, leads towards highlighting occupants as
significant contributors towards both business goals
and energy performance goals. This shift of focus in
energy management of buildings towards goals of
resident businesses and occupants opens up new way
of looking at buildings, and returning to their
original purpose, i.e. serving occupants by creating a
productive and caring ambient.
Apparently, buildings enhancement under this
assumption would imply involvement of a
significant number of researchers in psychology and
user experience (human-computer interaction) for
design of building energy management systems.
Potential outcome of research under the presented
assumptions would be BEMSs that center occupants,
provide customized control and high level of
interaction, and learn from occupants’ behavior in
order to adjust controls to support the business
climate of hosted organizations and businesses.
The potential resulting BEMS would exhibit a
perception of a caring system towards occupants, by
collecting their feedback. An example for feedback
on how occupants feel with respect to office
conditions would be a simple perception, such as “I
am hot” or “It is dark”, from which the BEMS
would learn and build a model of how occupants
perceive a certain combinations of settings
(Krioukov and Culler 2012). Furthermore, this
perception might vary if the occupant has
Scandinavian or Middle East background, so
occupant background would need to be taken into
consideration as well. A combination of settings
would consist of occupant’s description,
heating/cooling level, outside temperature, time of
the day, date in the calendar, etc. This will help in
classification and future decision-making processes.
Finally, two major outcomes that we can see
taking place as a result of our proposed position are
the following:
1. Development of new metrics, methods and
tools to combine energy performance and business
performance measures, considering their
interdependencies, to yield overall building
performance.
2. Development of new concept for BEMS
that actively involves occupants, in order to fully
utilize their potential.
These possible outcomes would significantly impact
decisions when selecting a retrofit for a given
building, and would contribute towards a more
holistic view of buildings, such as to make decisions
that minimize trade-offs.
5 SUMMARY AND OUTLOOK
We have emphasized the importance of extending
the definition of the concept of building
performance, which is usually equated to building
energy performance. Our goal is to argue that energy
performance cannot be viewed as an isolated issue,
and has to be observed hand in hand with the
performance of businesses, hosted by a given
building. This in turn means reaching out and
assessing the potential that lies in occupants and
researching ways of how they can be actively
involved to improve overall building performance,
i.e. to both improve energy performance as well as
meet business performance goals of resident
businesses. All of this need to be incorporated in
future BEMSs.
This implies that future BEMSs should support
operating buildings in energy-efficient manner,
thereby maximizing the cooperation level and
contentment level of occupants, as one of the main
contributors in saving energy of existing buildings,
but also in the productivity of residential businesses.
SMARTGREENS2015-4thInternationalConferenceonSmartCitiesandGreenICTSystems
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To achieve this goal, we believe that it is important
to accommodate occupants and enable active
communication between them and building energy
management systems. This can be achieved through
explaining and informing occupants, as well as
receiving feedback and other relevant type of
information for successful operation of the system.
Certainly, for development of such features,
psychologists, UX (user experience) and HCI
(human-computer interaction) experts will need to
be highly involved, which is not the case now.
Finally, we believe that placing a high value on
occupants’ contentment level will provide for a more
truthful and holistic view of the overall building
performance, and contribute towards a more
accurate assessment of potential energy performance
enhancements of existing commercial buildings.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is supported by the Innovation Fund
Denmark for the project COORDICY.
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