WP122: Automated Identification of Occupant Interactions in Renovations of Occupied Buildings

In renovations of occupied buildings, identification of occupant interactions, which occur when tenants and/or crews share the same space, is a critical task to ensure the timely execution of renovation work while maintaining the operational requirements of building tenants. Failure to identify occupant interactions can lead to loss in productivity for tenants and crews, as well as cost and schedule overruns. Current methods to identify occupant interactions are manual, leading to ad-hoc and inaccurate identification of occupant interactions.

This paper presents a formal representation of renovation planning information (i.e., occupant profiles, renovation schedule, and occupant interaction types) and reasoning methods that utilize this formal representation to identify occupant interactions (IOI) automatically. The IOI method builds on existing concepts and methods in product, organization, and process modeling to generate detailed occupant location and space sharing data more efficiently than existing methods. To validate the IOI method, we implemented and tested a prototype system during the planning stages of three on-going renovation projects. The results indicate that the renovation planning ontology and reasoning methods enable planners to represent renovation planning information more thoroughly, and with increased detail, leading them to identify occupant interactions more accurately than with traditional planning methods. Based on the validation results, project planners made interventions, where one project planner updated tenant move locations, another planned to update the renovation schedule in more detail, and the third planned to investigate alternative sequencing strategies.