Building Energy Simulations at Urban Scale Based on Standardised Data Models [in press]

Simulating the thermal behaviour on urban scale is frequently applied for supporting energy transition. Besides simulation frameworks specially developed for urban applications like SimStadt (1) or CitySim (2), also libraries (e.g. Modelica Library AIXLIB (3)) and simulation tools (e.g. EnergyPlus) for simulating single buildings are being used. A common problem of all approaches is that on urban scale only few global (and frequently unreliable) data from statistics or cadastral agenicies (e.g. generalised geometry, year of construction and function) is available. In order to derive the actual input parameters needed by a specific simulation model, each simulation tool has own strategies, usually being non-transparent for the user. In consequence, simulation results for a single building may differ significantly from reality and results are strongly dependent on the used tool
The approach presented in this paper improves quality and reproducibility of urban wide energy simulations by introducing a standardized "intermediate" representation (CityGML Energy ADE (5)) of the simulation input data. It allows the simultaneous representation of global building and the corresponding detailed physical parameters, data formally describing the building usage, internal energy gains and energy-relevant building systems. ... mehrFurthermore, the Energy ADE model supports the automatic derivation of input data sets for various simulation tools.