Developing and Validating Semi-Markov Occupancy Generative Models: A Technical Report
This work addresses occupancy modeling for energy management in commercial buildings, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing stochastic methods.
The researchers developed and validated inhomogeneous semi-Markov chain models to generate realistic occupancy sequences in commercial buildings, using real datasets and metrics like normalized Jensen-Shannon distance to demonstrate their effectiveness.
This report documents recent technical work on developing and validating stochastic occupancy models in commercial buildings, performed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) as part of the Sensor Impact Evaluation and Verification project under the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Building Technologies Office (BTO). In this report, we present our work on developing and validating inhomogeneous semi-Markov chain models for generating sequences of zone-level occupancy presence and occupancy counts in a commercial building. Real datasets are used to learn and validate the generative occupancy models. Relevant metrics such as normalized Jensen-Shannon distance (NJSD) are used to demonstrate the ability of the models to express realistic occupancy behavioral patterns.