For an effective energy management in intelligent buildings it is necessary to gather information about position/absence of people and the level of population. In this paper the smart occupancy detection system based on the active RFID is developed to satisfy such a demand. The performance of the developed system is tested and verified through various experiments. Furthermore the feasibility test of the active RFID tag is performed to verify whether it can be used as a location-based occupancy sensor. The developed core technology can be also applied to other fields such as security, healthcare, smart home, etc.