Residential Buildings Use-Phase Memory for Better Consumption Monitoring of Users and Design Improvement.

Summary Residents’ usages and behaviour are inadequately known and understood, as well as being highly variable. However, they play a determining role in the variability of both the energy consumption and environmental impact of residential buildings during their use-phase. This paper proposes a use-phase memory model for residential buildings, which stores energy and resource consumption, and usage patterns. Useful information is further extracted by data crossing and visual data representation. Building experts refer to it for two specific use-cases, namely designing a new sustainable building and renovating an existing one. This information helps them to understand energy and resource consumption and, real users’ behaviour and activities. Building’s users obtain different kinds of service in return for their collaboration and contribution. Our model is presently being deployed on a residential building, based on beneficial services for each building’s stakeholder, thus introducing a sustainable relationship between designers, the residential building and its users.