Postdoctoral Researcher: Occupant Behavior Generation for Urban Heat Stress Assessment

This postdoctoral position at the Centre d’Énergétique et de Thermique de Lyon (CETHIL) focuses on creating a computational framework to generate occupant behavior rules for thermal simulations in urban apartments. The goal is to model diverse, context-aware behaviors (e.g., window operation, ventilation use) to assess overheating risks under climate change. The work bridges engineering (Python, EnergyPlus simulations) and social sciences (qualitative behavior studies), requiring interdisciplinary expertise. The researcher will synthesize occupant profiles, adapt cooling strategies to contextual factors, and implement dynamic rules for large-scale thermal modeling. Successful candidates will contribute to both methodological innovation and applied climate resilience tools.

• Develop a Python-based tool to generate context-aware occupant behavior rules for thermal simulations, ensuring diversity and scalability.
• Conduct a literature review to identify key contextual factors influencing occupant actions (e.g., schedules, health, environmental constraints).
• Integrate generated behavior rules into EnergyPlus simulations to assess overheating risks across diverse urban apartment configurations.
• Collaborate with social scientists to validate behavioral assumptions against qualitative field data from projects like VF2+.
• Optimize rule sets to balance representativeness with computational efficiency for large-scale simulations (thousands of building configurations).
• Document methodologies and publish findings in interdisciplinary venues, emphasizing both technical and behavioral insights.