Planning for sustainable cities by estimating building occupancy with mobile phones
Name
s41467-019-11685-w.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
4.64 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
b2980cfc7efeb4cd5ab8a76e28daca10
Author(s)
Barbour, Edward
Davila, Carlos Cerezo
Gupta, Siddharth
Reinhart, Christoph
Kaur, Jasleen
Gonzalez, Marta C.
Date Issued
August 2019
Journal
Nature communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Barbour, Edward, et al., "Planning for sustainable cities by estimating building occupancy with mobile phones." Nature communications 10 (2019): no. 3736 doi 10.1038/S41467-019-11685-W ©2019 Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Accurate occupancy is crucial for planning for sustainable buildings. Using massive, passively-collected mobile phone data, we introduce a novel framework to estimate building occupancy at unprecedented scale. We show that, at urban-scale, occupancy differs widely from current estimates based on building types. For commercial buildings, we find typical occupancy rates are 5 times lower than current assumptions imply, while for residential buildings occupancy rates vary widely by neighborhood. Our mobile phone based occupancy estimates are integrated with a state-of-the-art urban building energy model to understand their impact on energy use predictions. Depending on the assumed relationship between occupancy and internal building loads, we find energy consumption which differs by +1% to −15% for residential buildings and by −4% to −21% for commercial buildings, compared to standard methods. This highlights a need for new occupancy-to-load models which can be applied at urban-scale to the diverse set of city building types. ©2019
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sustainable Design Lab
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41467-019-11685-W
