A review of occupant behaviour in residential buildings

•Understanding the human-building interactions in residential buildings has a high potential of energy saving.•Monitoring occupant behaviour in residential buildings presented challenges referring to movements between spaces, diversity of activities and, privacy issues.•Mixed-mode methods for monitoring occupant behaviour provided explanatory variables and allowed triangulation of monitoring results.•Occupancy and interactions with building devices are highly dependent on time, which was explored by stochastic modelling methods.•Occupant behaviour models provide the possibility to evaluate accurate scenarios for human-building interaction in order to enhance building energy performance. Occupant behaviour has a direct impact on building energy consumption. A better understanding of human-building interactions enables to describe with higher accuracy the occupant behaviour. This paper addresses occupant behaviour in residential buildings, providing a review of current methods in (1) monitoring occupant behaviour, (2) developing occupant behaviour models, and (3) applying occupant behaviour models in building performance simulations. Occupant behaviour studies with focus on residential buildings are presented including both challenges and potential for improving building energy performance.