Occupancy patterns and building performance: developing occupancy patterns for Portuguese residential buildings

Abstract

The construction sector is responsible for enormous environmental impacts. Those are mainly due to the use of materials, energy and land. The impact of a single building is normally directly dependent on the size of the building or in the area of land it occupies. In this article, it is argued that strategies to improve building performance by reducing building size must take into account occupancy patterns of each type of building compartment in order to correctly assess compartment area needs. Nevertheless, occupancy patterns typically found in the literature do not provide enough detail to allow a deep analysis of the use of each type of building compartment. The objective of this study is to propose methods to produce detailed occupancy patterns that allows the assessment of building performance. For this, a questionnaire was developed and tested in the development of preliminary detailed occupancy patterns for Portuguese residential buildings.