Abstract
The goal of this research is to provide effective responses to the aims using available data and resources, although this resulted in certain limitations which should be considered in concert with the findings. The principal limitations are summarised in order to demonstrate the technical constraints experienced during the course of recruiting sample size, running statistical analyses and building energy modelling for calibration studies. The scope of this chapter is an overview of the all-important technical challenges and constraints experienced in developing a novel methodological approach for building a performance evaluation that plays a role both in analysing statistical tests and dynamic thermal simulations for assessment of overheating and thermal comfort across the sample size. It also discusses the relationship of thermal properties of buildings with home energy performance and maps the dynamic behaviour of the different aspects to be able to investigate these determinant factors independently in order to coordinate them and enhance each dummy’s variables in optimising occupants’ thermal comfort. This novel development technique could provide significant contributions in terms of considering occupants’ real-life experiences of energy use in the retrofit intervention decision-making process. Therefore, a highly analytical approach has been chosen with a very high level of abstraction for energy policy.
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Despite the great level of data collection procurement that has been reached in the investigation of human–building interactions and their impact on energy use inherent with optimising thermal comfort, this study presents a number of limitations which, overall, have a significant impact on adopting an STS approach to promote the implementation of retrofit interventions. Up to now, a number of studies have investigated a limited research design approach on the influences of building physics, occupants’ behaviour and its interaction with the environment, but many South-eastern Mediterranean countries remain unexplored in this area. This is the reason that this research mainly focused on occupants’ habitual adaptive behaviour since these are complex parameters to explore and analyse in corroborating changing climate conditions. This study was unable to encompass the entire social housing stock, but it only considered the most dominant social housing typology in Northern Cyprus. However, that it consists of a comprehensive overview of occupants’ behaviour is extremely important in identifying the triggering factors and their weight in domestic energy use significantly.
Further research is needed to better understand the possible link between occupants’ behaviour and energy consumption. Considerably more work will need to be done investigating specific climate conditions and different housing typology, as well as in relation to subjective measures (households’ socio-demographic characteristics, background and social structure etc.). In addition, other novel methodology should be developed to include advanced occupants’ behaviour modelling features (e.g. stochastic or deterministic models) in building energy performance evaluation. However, our empirical analysis revealed that the calibration processes will require further user inputs. It is evident that the validation procurement is an essential step to improve the accuracy of simulation results. One of the most important technical aspects is that the adoption of robust methods and international benchmarking criteria need to be assigned to the analytical energy models for data validation. This could lead aid researchers and designers to develop better models and improve the comparisons amongst different variables in energy simulation models.
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Ozarisoy, B., Altan, H. (2022). Limitations: Developing an Evidence-Based Energy Policy Framework to Asset Robust Energy Performance Evaluation and Certification Schemes. In: Handbook of Retrofitting High Density Residential Buildings. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11854-8_10
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