Office buildings occupancy analysis and prediction associated with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic

Buildings’ occupancy is one of the important factors causing the energy performance and sustainability gap in buildings. Better occupancy prediction decreases this gap both in the design stage and in the use phase of the building. Machine learning-based models proved to be very accurate and fast for occupancy prediction when buildings are exploited under normal conditions. Meanwhile, during the Covid-19 pandemic occupancy of the offices has dramatically changed. The study presents 2 office buildings’ long-term monitoring results for different periods of the pandemic. It aims to analyse actual occupancies during the pandemic and its influence on the ELM (Extreme Learning Machine) based occupancy-forecasting models’ reliability. The results show much lower actual occupancies in the offices than given in standards and methodologies; it is still low even when quarantines are cancelled. Average peak occupancy within the whole measured period is: for Building A – 12–20% and for Building B – 2–23%. The daily occupancy schedules differ for both offices as they belong to different industries. ELM-SA model has shown low accuracies during pandemic periods as a result of lower occupancies – R(2) = 0.27–0.56.