Chapter 9 Towards Democratizing Human–Building Simulation and Analytics

This work addresses a key emerging issue for building resiliency in the digital age and the advent of “smart” environments, specifically the impact of AI on human-building interactions. We present herein a concise summary of the workflows we have developed over time to simulate human-movements and dynamics of human-building interactions. We discuss the applications of human behaviour simulation in the analysis of building environments. We then discuss the approaches which use dynamic human-aware simulations in improving environment designs. We highlight the challenges in existing simulation workflows, which are usually decoupled from environment modeling tools or often tightly coupled with any specialized modeling platform. Such workflows require significant infrastructure and domain expertise, hindering the users’ abilities to seamlessly simulate, analyze, and incorporate dynamics of human-building interactions into their preferred design workflows. We introduce a democratized approach using an on-demand service-based workflow for human behaviour simulation and analysis of human-building interactions.