Toward a theory-driven ontological framework for the representation of inhabitants in building performance computing

Building performance computing focuses primarily on physical processes in buildings. As such, early practices in building simulation adopted a reductionist approach to the representation of buildings' inhabitants. More recently, efforts have been undertaken to enhance the representational realism of inhabitants in building modeling. However, progress in this area requires a robust ontological foundation, which in turn requires a theoretical understanding of the relevant domain. Based on the appraisal of past efforts, this paper identifies a gap between behavioral theories and occupant representations in building models. Consequently, a high-level occupant behavior theory is introduced and its relevance for ontological developments is illustrated through a derivative representational scheme (“otto”: occupants theory-tailored ontology). The established link between behavioral theory and the derivative data schema is suggested to provide the necessary conditions for the development of a comprehensive ontological framework toward representation of inhabitants' presence and behavior in computational building models.