Multi-constrained authoring of occupant behavior narratives in architectural design

Building-Information Modeling (BIM) tools provide static representations of built environments, disjointed from the expected behaviors of their future inhabitants. Current approaches for simulating buildings in use can be categorized as building-centric, where occupancy distributions are specified, behavior-centric, where multi-agent behaviors are modeled, or occupant-centric, where occupants behave based on their individual motivations. In this paper, we combine these methods into an integrated framework to author narratives that satisfy multi-level time-varying constraints, such as (a) building-level occupancy specifications, (b) zone-level behavior distributions, and (c) occupant-level motivations. Such information is encoded into customizable templates associated with BIM models. A case study highlights the ability of this approach to seamlessly author behavior narratives that can be used for visualizing, analyzing and communicating how buildings may be used by their future inhabitants.