Profiling Occupant Behaviour in Danish Dwellings using Time Use Survey Data - Part I: Data Description and Activity Profiling

Occupant behaviour has been shown to be one of the key driving factors of uncertainty in prediction of energy consumption in buildings. Building occupants affect building energy use directly and indirectly by interacting with building energy systems such as adjusting temperature set-points, switching lights on/off, using electrical devices and opening/closing windows.

Furthermore, building inhabitants’ daily activity profiles clearly shape the timing of energy demand in households. Modelling energy-related human activities throughout the day, therefore, is crucial to defining more realistic occupant profiles for prediction of energy use to reduce the gap between predicted and real building energy consumptions.

To generate accurate occupant profiles for the residential sector in Denmark, the Danish time use surveys are considered an essential data source. The latest Danish diarybased time use survey was conducted in 2008/09 among 17,707 individuals from 4,679 households. Individuals’ daily activities were logged in 10-minute time increments throughout 24 h, starting and ending at 4am, during both weekdays and weekends.

The dataset was clustered in 10 activities that were considered suitable for modelling occupancy profiles and behavioural patterns related to energy use. The latter were analysed for different categories such as variation during different days of the week and seasons of the year.