Center for the Built Environment

Within the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) and in the greater building research and engineering community, there is growing interest in low energy cooling strategies that take advantage of natural ventilation. To support this rising interest, there is an associated need for more sophisticated models of occupant control of windows. All too often, existing models rely on simplifications that fit occupant behavior into standard control schedules that lack the responsiveness to environmental conditions demonstrated by real people in real buildings. This report is intended to bring these issues to the attention of the CBE audience, and to provide a summary of the origin, implementation, and applicability of the surprising variety of models predicting occupant window control now emerging in the academic literature.