Impact of Occupants' Behaviour on Energy Consumption and Corresponding Strategies in Office Buildings

Among commercial buildings, office buildings have the largest number and have the highest total energy consumption (about 14% of the energy consumed by all commercial buildings). Energy used by the HVAC and lighting systems to create comfort indoor thermal and visual environments account for more than half of the total energy usage. The utilization rate of space affects the actual requirement of space heating, cooling and lighting, as well as the performance of equipment and systems. A slow but steady increase in office vacancy is observed as more people work asymmetrically across increasingly remote locations or with a more flexible schedule. Unlike in traditional offices, work style in many new offices involves towards a shared workplace with diverse work activities. This paper focuses on the impact of occupants' behaviour on energy utilization in different types of office buildings and corresponding workplace spatial strategies. The features of the energy use for space cooling, heating and lighting with different occupant rates in different spatial settings, such as private office, open office and coworking office, are depicted. Furthermore, the potential for energy savings with optimization technique, i.e., integrating the real time occupancy data into building air-conditioning and lighting systems for usage-based demand control strategies, are estimated with the method of simulation. According to the calculation results, strategies for improving energy consumption for different office settings are proposed respectively for design and operation.