DISTRIBUTED SIMULATION FRAMEWORK TO ANALYZE THE ENERGY EFFECTS OF ADAPTIVE THERMAL COMFORT BEHAVIOR OF BUILDING OCCUPANTS

People spend most of their time in indoor building environments. Thus, providing a comfortable living environment to the occupants is of extreme importance. Adaptive thermal comfort models developed through many studies suggested that the dynamic thermal based behavior of occupants can be utilized to optimize various energy influencing processes in the building. However, there is little research on how these behavioral patterns can be controlled and influenced using appropriate interventions. In this study, an agent-based model simulating zone-wise thermal comfort level of occupants in an office building is coupled with the energy simulation model through Lightweight Communications and Marshalling (LCM), a distributed computing framework. Case study results demonstrate the LCM framework's ability to communicate between simulation models across various spatially distributed workstations and allow for the quantification of the energy saving potential of various thermal comfort based interventions.