Predicting household occupancy for smart heating control: A comparative performance analysis of state-of-the-art approaches

This paper provides a comparative study of state-of-the-art means of predicting occupancy for smart heating control applications. We focus on approaches that predict the occupancy state of a home using occupancy schedules - that is, past records of the occupancy state. We ran our analysis on actual occupancy schedules covering several months for 45 homes. Our results show that state-of-the-art, schedule-based occupancy prediction algorithms achieve an overall prediction accuracy of over 80%. We also show that the performance of these algorithms is close to the theoretical upper bound expressed by the predictability of the input schedules. Building upon these results, we used ISO 13790-standard modelling techniques to analyse the energy savings that can be achieved by smart heating controllers that use occupancy predictors. Furthermore, we investigated the trade-off between achievable savings (typically 6-17% on average) and the risk of comfort loss for household residents.