Towards a User-Centered and Condition-Based Approach in Building Operation and Maintenance

Ensuring a sustainable performance to buildings is a key topic that cannot overlook occupancy conditions and users’ behavior. In fact, individuals’ actions (man-man and man-built environment interactions) highly affect the overall building efficiency as well as the possibility to ensure the designed level of performance. Such occupancy issues are connected not only to energy consumptions but also to other common building and facility Operation and Management (O&M) tasks, especially in relation to building components and technological systems maintenance (e.g., elevators, doors, flooring, devices, etc.) and building use (e.g., cleaning, visitors’ flows, room occupancy, etc.). Monitoring and understanding users’ behavioral patterns and their effect on building components through smart and integrated cognitive systems can optimize predictive and corrective actions, by linking a “user-centered” to a “condition-based” approach. This paper critically reviews results from previous works on conditioned-based O&M and proposes improvements to the approach, based on a user-centered point of view. A general framework is proposed by combining monitoring tasks (spaces use, occupants’ actions, and flows) with occupants’ awareness/engagement, through management and communication platforms. Framework data can be used to derive occupancy profiles (including models of interactions with building devices) and inputs for condition-based analyses, in order to allow designers and Building and Facilities managers to improve actions planning.