Uncertainty of building energy performance at spatio-temporal scales: A comparison of aggregated and disaggregated behavior models of solar shade control

The impact of occupant uncertainty and inter-occupant diversity of solar shade control on building energy performance at spatio-temporal scales was investigated. A stochastic model of manual solar shades developed in a previous study based on field measurements was used in this paper. Co-simulation, statistical calculation and uncertainty analysis were conducted. Comparison of energy prediction uncertainty between aggregated and disaggregated behavior models was performed to determine whether occupant behavior and related energy prediction were suppressed by the aggregated behavior model. The results show that predicted energy uncertainty due to occupant behavior varies largely at different spatio-temporal scales ranging from 0.8% to 160%. Occupants’ impact should be considered at small spatio-temporal scales due to high energy uncertainty (can reach more than 100%) while this effect can be ignored at large spatio-temporal scales (the uncertainty is less than 2% at annual scale). The suppressing effect by the aggregated model on shade behavior uncertainty is significant, but it is not significant on resulting energy uncertainty, especially for large buildings and annual energy prediction. Aggregated model for the developed shade behavior model can be used instead of disaggregated model in the prediction of annual energy demand of large buildings.