Modeling and simulating thermostat behaviors of office occupants: are values more important than comfort?

Existing literature postulates thermal behaviors primarily to be a consequence of thermal discomfort. However, some thermal behaviors, such as changing the thermostat settings in an office building, can cause thermal discomfort to other occupants in the building. Given this social constraint of thermostat behaviors, our paper uses the human-building interaction (HBI) dataset to estimate the impact of office occupants' personal values on their thermostat-up and thermostat-down behaviors using logistic regression. Our preliminary results show that personal values such as agreeableness significantly impact thermal behaviors above and beyond what can be explained by thermal comfort-related features. Finally, we also develop a data-driven agent-based model (DDABM) to understand the emergence of thermostat behaviors influenced by personal values under various environmental conditions.