DCount - A probabilistic algorithm for accurately disaggregating building occupant counts into room counts

Sensing accurately the number of occupants in the rooms of a building enables many important applications for smart building operation and energy management. A range of sensor technologies has been studied and applied to the problem. However, it is costly to achieve high accuracy by instrumenting all rooms in a building with dedicated occupant sensors. In this paper, we propose a new concept for estimating accurate room-level counts of occupants. The idea is to disaggregate accurate building-level counts via existing common sensors available at the room level. This solution is cost-effective as it scales to large buildings without requiring dedicated sensors in each room. We propose an algorithm named DCount that implements this concept. Our results document that DCount can provide room-level counts with a low normalized root mean squared error of 0.93. This is a major improvement compared to a state-of-the-art algorithm using common sensors and ventilation rate measurements resulting in a normalized root mean squared error of 1.54 on the same data set. Further more, we demonstrate how the results enable occupant-driven analysis of plug-load consumption which is one out of many applications using accurate room-level counts of occupants we hope to enable by proposing DCount.