Modelling Information Flow of Occupant Feedback in Office Buildings

Occupant comfort plays an important role in office buildings in terms of environmental, social, and economic aspects. Facility managers need to evaluate occupant feedback to moderate the negative consequences on office users and ultimately on the corporations that occupy office spaces. However, in the current facility management systems, occupant feedback is not effectively collected and evaluated; thus, facility managers cannot utilize this information in making critical decisions when operating, maintaining and retrofitting office facilities. This paper presents the initial results of an ongoing research study, which focus es on integrating occupant feedback with Building Information Model (BIM) for assisting decision-makers in the facility management phase. The first step of this research study was to identify the information items that are required to represent occupant feedback for effective use in the facility management phase. To identify the required information items, interviews were performed with office users at ten office buildings and use cases were developed. To validate the use cases, interviews were performed with twelve facility managers. The aim of this paper is to present a sample of the use cases developed and describe the occupant feedback information flow observed in the office buildings. The results show that the occupant feedback data include detailed information related to: (1) location where the problem is observed, which is represented by building, and/or floor, and/or room, and/or façade, and/or table/zone/region depending on the case; (2) location of the user, that is represented by building, floor, room, table/zone/region; (3) source of the problem that is represented by type of building element and related building element; (4) source location, which specifies the location of a problem source that is different than the location where the problem is observed; and (5) time.