Occupancy modelling in shared spaces of buildings: a queueing approach

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a queueing model for the simulation of occupancy patterns in shared spaces of buildings. Specifically, occupancy is modelled via an infinite-server queue with time-varying arrival and departure rates. In order to better capture the abrupt changes in occupancy, we also present an algorithm that efficiently learns the locally homogeneous intervals from the data and estimates the model parameters separately on each learned interval. Evaluated on the real-world occupancy data, the model has proved its capability of realistically reproducing the variations of occupancy, as well as the key properties, such as peak occupancy time, first arrival and last departure times, and occupied duration. We also compare our model with several occupancy models in the previous work, and show that our model is preferable in terms of simple structure, agile construction, minimal effort of manual calibration and the ability to reflect the occupancy patterns truthfully.