BuildOcc: A large language model occupant agent platform for building energy research
TL;DR
This study presents BuildOcc, an open-source Python platform that grounds large language model agents in the ATUS, a nationally representative diary dataset covering 16,684 respondents, and provides the building energy community with a reusable, openly available implementation of the occupant behavioral layer.
Abstract
Occupants are a primary source of uncertainty in building energy consumption and management, yet existing occupant behavior models cannot capture adaptive and reasoning responses considering the occupant's personal history, current context, and the type of energy signal being delivered. This study presents BuildOcc, an open-source Python platform that grounds large language model agents in the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), a nationally representative diary dataset covering 16,684 respondents. Through BuildOcc, each simulated occupant agent can be instantiated with a demographic persona drawn from ATUS population statistics, a memory stream that accumulates and reflects on timestep-level observations, and an activity scheduler that samples empirically from ATUS time-at-activity distributions. The platform exposes a three-layer interface - Python library, REST API, and Model Context Protocol server - so that any building energy tool (EnergyPlus, Home Assistant) can integrate behavioral intelligence without bespoke coupling code. A plugin registry lets the community add new occupant strata, custom schedulers, and alternative memory backends as separate installable packages. Two validation tiers show that ATUS-grounded sampling reproduces empirically calibrated activity distributions and that demographic priors propagate into persona-consistent agent reasoning across timesteps, establishing internal consistency across strata. BuildOcc provides the building energy community with a reusable, openly available implementation of the occupant behavioral layer. BuildOcc is openly released at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21192895 under the Apache License 2.0 and installable via pip install buildocc.
