MODELING METHOD FOR BEHAVIORAL CHANGE RELATED TO ENERGY CONSUMPTION IN OFFICE SPACE: Changes in graduate students' power operation of automated office equipment by information provision

It is important to not only improve the performance of the building envelope and the efficiency of the equipment system but also to focus on occupants’ behavior to further promote energy conservation in buildings. In fact, the method called “Nudge, ” which has been applied in the field of behavioral science, is attracting attention as an energy-saving measure for buildings. Nudge is a system that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. Through information provision using Nudge, people can be encouraged to change their behavior to save energy. In a large-scale experiment conducted in the US, the electricity consumption of households was reduced by approximately 2% on average as a result of providing information on electricity consumption compared with that of neighborhoods. It is thought that energy-saving behaviors are likely to occur because those behaviors directly lead to economic benefits for households. On the other hand, in public spaces such as offices and schools, the energy-saving effects may differ because occupants do not directly pay for utilities. In order to encourage energy conservation, it is important to promote initiatives that utilize information provision in office spaces. For this purpose, the impact of information provision on public spaces need to be verified, and the necessity of applying such measures must be clarified. In previous research on occupants’ behavior, there are some examples in which the probability that occupants perform actions such as switching off lights and opening windows is modeled by logistic regression analysis. However, there are few examples on modeling the operation of automated office equipment. For further energy conservation, it is important to reduce wasteful consumption such as forgetting to turn off equipment upon leaving. This paper proposes a method to model the operation of office equipment. Moreover, the energy-saving effects of information provision are evaluated using the model. The model was created by logistic regression analysis, and the data to determine the model parameters was obtained through an information provision experiment. The experiment was conducted in a laboratory as an example of a working space. In this paper, therefore, the operation of equipment by graduate students was modeled. Modeling made it possible to calculate each subject’s probability of turning off the PC and Display when leavi