Social-Behavioral Modeling for Complex Systems

29 Modeling Social and Spatial Behavior in Built Environments: Current Methods and Future Directions

Davide Schaumann and Mubbasir Kapadia

Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

Introduction

Built environments have a major impact on the people who inhabit them: they affect the inhabitants' well‐being as well as their ability to partake and excel in various processes that occur within and around buildings (living, working, leisure, etc.). In turn, building inhabitants have a major impact on how buildings are designed and operated, affecting the consumption of various resources over time.

At present, the correlation between a given built environment and its effect on the people who inhabit it becomes known only after the environment has been built and occupied. Post‐occupancy evaluations (POE), for example, compare the expected building performance with the actual one to improve an existing situation or gain knowledge that can inform the design of future buildings. Data collected in existing buildings is often analyzed using mathematical methods (such as regression, deterministic, and stochastic) to correlate variables of human behavior and the built environment (e.g. Wang et al. 2005; Mahdavi and Tahmasebi 2015). The assumption that using mathematical models validated in a specific context helps to predict human behavior aspects in a different context, however, may be flawed due to the unique nature of cultural, social, and environmental ...