Our SMARTeeSTORY partners at TU Delft have just published a new paper in Building and Environment on how building automation and control systems can better respond to what people actually need in indoor spaces, while still supporting energy performance goals.
The paper explains a simple but important point: “comfort” is multi‑domain. A control action that helps in one area can easily create problems in another. For example, lowering blinds can reduce glare but also block daylight and change heating and cooling needs. Opening windows can change the temperature and bring in outdoor noise or pollution.
To understand how research is handling these trade‑offs, the authors conducted a systematic review and identified 43 relevant multi‑domain studies that link occupant needs with building automation and control. They find that thermal comfort is included in all studies. Visual comfort and indoor air quality are often included too, but acoustics is rarely addressed and not actively controlled in the reviewed building automation setups.
A key takeaway is that most research still treats comfort domains separately. Even when multiple domains are considered, the underlying demand models are often unimodal: thermal, visual, acoustic, or air-quality requirements are represented independently. Truly multimodal models, where one domain can influence preferences or tolerance in another, or where overall comfort is modelled as a combined outcome of several domains, remain uncommon.
So what needs to happen next to make occupant‑centric automation practical and trustworthy? This includes clearer benchmarking between single-domain and multi-domain approaches, more work on multimodal demand models beyond temperature and air quality, especially for façade and shading control, and more transparent, preference-aware control strategies that make trade-offs understandable to both users and facility teams.
Read the full paper
P. Martinez-Alcaraz, P. de la Barra, C.P. Andriotis, U. Knaack, A. Luna-Navarro,
Current trends and future directions for addressing multi-domain occupant demands in building automation and control systems, Building and Environment, Volume 297, 2026, 114588, ISSN 0360-1323, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2026.114588
Access TU Delft’s and all SMARTeeSTORY scientific publications here and on ZENODO.
