The chapter reviews the impact of occupancy in buildings, in particular in
thermal comfort and energy efficiency. Concerning the first issue, this chapter will first
propose a means to estimate occupancy, the impact of occupation in thermal comfort
measured by the Predicted Mean Vote index, and its use for real-time control of HVAC
equipment. All data used are measured data of a real university building under normal
occupation. The effect of occupancy in energy efficiency will focus on the residential
segment, using data of a recent installation of a data acquisition and control system in a
household located in the south of Portugal. This work shows that the impact of
occupancy in electricity consumption becomes more evident as the electric energy is
being desegregated and that the availability of this information by the occupants can be
used to improve energy efficiency. Moreover, the use of occupation in the design of
electric consumption forecasting methods will also be discussed.
Keywords: Artificial neural networks, Computational learning, Data acquisition,
Energy efficiency, Electricity consumption, Forecasting models, HVAC, Multiobjective
genetic algorithms, Occupation, Thermal comfort.
