Combining Empirical Social Science and Computer Simulation Modelling to Help Understand Energy Efficiency Measures for Housing in Aberdeen

Tony Craig, Jiaqi Ge, Kathryn Colley, Gary Polhill, The James Hutton Institute

Societal problems like fuel poverty (defined in various ways, but essentially requiring above a certain proportion of household income to be spend on fuel bills) are not simple to solve as they are not caused by a single factor. Keeping the cold out (or the heat in) is sometimes considered to be a technical problem best solved by an engineering approach. However, becasue peoples situations and responses to these situations are vastly different, technical models of housing have a tendency to be inaccurate in predicting the likely sucess or failure of schemes designed to alleviate fuel poverty – a problem best understood as a socio-technical system. In this presentation we present a multi-actor case study (carried out within the EU H2020 SMARTEES project) designed to explore the alleviation of fuel poverty in particular areas within the city of Aberdeen. The process of mapping the different stakeholders, and spending time as a research team, establishing in detail the exact research questions being tackled within this case, was a very important aspect of the work. Rather than simply attempting to optimise the outcome measure of fuel efficiency, it was important to consider a number of aspects of the people involved in the case itself. This includes matters of trust and reputation, issues of fear and other emotions, and importantly, the issue of behaviour change itself. We present here the process of building an agent-based computer simulation model, grounded in data from interviews with key stakeholders, and a questionnaire survey of the case study population.