How thermal comfort affects the energy-efficiency gap in residential buildings

Up until now, thermal comfort metrics are mostly used to design heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in office buildings. Studies indicate that the demand in the building sector amounts to approximately 40%, while residential demand amounts to roughly 25% of the total energy demand. Notwithstanding, the role of the interaction of occupants and their corresponding comfort and discomfort remain unknown - especially in residential situations. This work thus contributes to the understanding of the issue of thermal comfort in residential buildings. This is achieved by extensively discussing the application of thermal comfort for small groups of people and by systematically deriving new requirements that also make a novel multi-agent simulation (MAS) approach necessary. By explicitly modelling the detailed steps of an occupant simulation, we lay a sound foundation to explain the variation in the energy consumption of dwellings and to reveal the impact of social influences.