A three-level human movement model in the whole building scale

Abstract

The estimation and prediction of human movement in office buildings may benefit the access control, building energy simulation, elevator scheduling and HVAC system control. A human movement model is usually required in this task to describe occupant movements in the building. In our paper, we propose a three level human movement model in the whole building scale which takes the schedules, the vertical movement and the horizontal movement into consideration. The schedules compose the deterministic part of the occupant movement, and the random part is modelled as inhomogeneous Markov chains. The latter one is further split into the vertical movement and the horizontal movement model. In addition, our work could be considered as a framework which is capable of integrating other existing human movement models.