Statistical simulation of user behaviour in low-energy office buildings

A large number of design guidelines and tools are available for the design of passive cooling systems. However, the building engineer should take several uncertainties into account since the actual use of the building, the building physical properties or the user behaviour are uncertain. One promising approach to include these uncertainties in the design procedure is the use of statistical models: The design parameter is defined by a mean value and its deviation. From a control theoretical point of view, the deterministic controlled system responds to random disturbance variables by a statistically distributed response function. Considering the institute building of Fraunhofer ISE (Herkel et al., 2001) as example, this study shows how statistical simulations can be applied to the design process of passive cooling in low-energy office buildings, cf. (Voss et al., 2005b).