Understanding Occupant Behaviors in Dynamic Environments using OBiDE framework

Abstract

Occupants’ movements and presence are fundamental and the pre-requisites for any type of occupant behaviors’ understanding which tells whether a building location is occupied, the number of occupants or an occupant with a specific profile in a certain location. Numerous studies have been conducted over the past few decades to model occupant behaviors stochastically for an improved understanding of their activities for different facility management applications. Despite many research efforts to model dynamic behaviors of building occupants, the understanding of their behaviors by incorporating the contextual information linked to the evolution of the building environment is still not adequately explored. The contextual information linked to locations in dynamic environments changes often over time in terms of position, size, properties and relationships with the environment. This changing building environment affects the occupants’ movements and presence inside the facility which ultimately degrades the process of inferring their accurate activities based on the location context. Henceforth, the evolving building information is required to be mapped with occupant movements for an improved understanding of their changing behaviors. To fill this research gap, a framework named ‘Occupant Behaviors in Dynamic Environments’ (OBiDE) is designed for providing a ‘blueprint map’ to integrate existing DNAS (Drivers, Needs, Systems, Actions) ontology (i.e. a scheme to model occupant behaviors) with our semantic trajectory enrichment model to better understand the occupant behaviors by tracking the dynamicity of building locations. The proposed framework extends the usability of DNAS by providing a centralized knowledge base that holds the movements of occupants with relevant historicized contextual information of the building environment to study occupant behaviors for different facility management applications.