Extending the Brick schema to represent metadata of occupants

Energy-related behaviors of occupants constitute a key factor influencing building performance;accordingly, the measured occupant data can support the objective assessment of the indoorenvironment and energy performance of buildings, which can inform building design andoperationaldecisions. Existing data schemas focus on metadata of sensors, meters, physicalequipment, and IoT devices in buildings; however, they are limited in representing themetadata of occupant data,including occupants’ presence in spaces, movement betweenspaces, interactions with building systems or IoT devices, and preference of indoorenvironmental needs. To address this gap, an extension to the widely adopted metadataschema, Brick, is proposedto represent the contextual, behavioral, and demographicinformation of occupants. The proposed extension includes four parts: (1) a new “Occupant”classto represent occupants’ demography and energy related behavioral patterns,(2)newsubclasses under the Equipment class to represent envelope system and personal thermalcomfort devices,(3) new subclasses under the Point class to represent occupant sensing andstatus,and (4) new auxiliary properties for occupant interactable equipment to represent thelevel of controllability for eachpiece ofequipment by occupants. The extension is implementedin the Brick schema and has been tested using multiple occupant datasets from the ASHRAEGlobal Occupant Database. The extension enables Brick schema to capture diverse types ofoccupant sensing data and their metadata for FAIR data research and applications.