Data sources and approaches for building occupancy profiles at the urban scale – A review

Buildings’ occupant profiles at the urban scale play an important role in various applications like Urban Building Energy Modeling (UBEM) and assessing energy consumption patterns and distribution at the urban scale. Due to the lack of data availability and cost-consuming process, estimating the building occupancy profile at the urban scale is challenging, and fixed building occupant profiles are primarily used in previous studies, leading to errors in calculating building energy consumption. In recent years, novel data sources have created an opportunity for a deeper understanding of building occupant patterns. This paper comprehensively reviews different aspects and categories of building occupant profiles at the urban scale, approaches, and available data sources. It includes a detailed comparison between different data sources and assesses their capability for estimating the building occupant profiles at the urban scale. General strategies to estimate the building occupant profile at the urban scale and its interrelation with human mobility are portrayed in detail. Additionally, research gaps and potential future directions of the urban-scale building occupancy field of study are also explored.