IEDE hosts 8th Expert Meeting of IEA-EBC Annex 79 on Occupant-Centric Building Design and Operation

Annex 79 is a five-year project under the International Energy Agency (IEA) Energy in Buildings and Communities (EBC) programme investigating occupant-centric building design and operation.

The UCL IEDE hosting team, Dr Farhang Tahmasebi (Annex 79 Subtask 3 co-lead), Dr Gesche Huebner, Yan Wang and Prof Dejan Mumovic, welcomed more than 150 researchers from across the globe to the virtual meeting, and further collaborated with the international research team towards realising the project objectives, including:

• Understanding the interactions between occupants and building systems, and ways of encouraging occupants to take advantage of adaptive opportunities for improving their comfort situation and having a positive impact on building energy use.
• Developing methods and guidelines for integrating occupant models in building design and operation.
• Performing focussed case studies to test the new methods and models in different design and operation phases in order to obtain valuable feedback for the researchers, practitioners, and policy makers.

The Operating Agents of IEA-EBC Annex 79 are Prof Andreas Wagner (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany) and Prof Liam O’Brien (Carleton University, Canada), collaborating with academics and industrial practitioners from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and United States of America.