Loughborough Celebrates another PhD success

Loughborough Celebrates another PhD success
27th June 2017 Karen Holmes

Everyone in the LoLo community would like to congratulate Selin Yilmaz  on passing her viva with minor corrections in May 2017.

Her thesis title is ‘Stochastic Bottom-up Modelling of Household Appliance Usage to Quantify the Demand Response Potential in UK Residential Sector’,

Selin tells us about her work and time with the LoLo CDT:

What your research/thesis was about

My research presents the challenges, current approaches and future direction of creating mathematical models of occupant behaviour in domestic buildings for the purpose of predicting household electrical appliance usage. Modelling household appliance usage has received significant interest from researchers worldwide for use in building simulation and demand side response studies. However, such studies have been constrained by the lack of a common modelling approach, the lack of suitable monitoring data on which to develop models and the lack of a model validation framework. This work investigates these constraints through the study of one of the most comprehensive datasets of household appliance usage recorded to date: the ‘Household Electricity Use Survey’ which monitored 5860 electrical appliances in 251 UK homes in 2010-2011. Further statistical analysis identifies the impacts of the factors influencing appliance usage, such as the household type, the day of the week, seasonal variation and the inter- dependencies between the occupants’ use of different appliances. The research discusses the design of future monitoring studies (including monitoring strategies and sample sizes) and the design of future research studies (including statistical analysis, probabilistic modelling and validation approaches) in order to further improve our understanding of and ability to predict the behaviours of occupants within buildings.

What were the highlights of LoLo

It was a privilege to study at UK’s premier centre for energy demand research in the built environment. I had the opportunity to have an access to one of the most comprehensive dataset on electricity demand in UK. I have been part of the IEA Annex 66, where I had published journals, and soon co-authored a modelling book for “Occupant behaviour modelling”. I also visited Japan for 2 months, and a special review journal paper has been submitted.

What are you doing now

I have just started my post-doc in Geneva University. I will be working on scenario modelling related to energy consumption in buildings. This also involves developing detailed energy consumption by end-use and their drivers as well as energy efficiency and CO2 related indicators from all EU countries as well as Norway, Switzerland and Serbia.