Nowadays, urbanists are facing increasing demands regarding the performance of urban development projects in terms of environment, quality of life and socio‐economic issues. In order to address these increasing demands, actors involved in urban development projects need tools capable of assessing their impacts. These tools should also enable the comparison of all potential scenarios. Taking into account these needs, Nobatek and Tecnalia have developed NEST (Neighbourhood Evaluation for Sustainable Territories), which is one of the first tools that allows for a simultaneous environmental, economic and social analysis at the district scale, with a life‐cycle perspective. Using NEST, the authors of this work carried out an environmental and social evaluation of three districts in the city of Donostia, in the framework of the Essai Urbain research project. The evaluation first consisted of analysing baseline environmental impacts of the three districts. Then, with the objective of reducing environmental impacts and increasing social well‐being, the authors proposed several refurbishment scenarios for the studied districts, focusing on energy issues. The study was performed in close collaboration with the city of Donostia, which enabled the identification and selection of the most relevant scenarios from an environmental standpoint. Moreover, the NEST software has caught the attention of the project's stakeholders regarding environmental issues. Finally, NEST seems to be an interesting alternative in accounting for sustainable development issues from the early stages of urban development projects.
Nowadays municipalities are facing an increasing commitment regarding the energy and environmental performance of cities and districts. The multiple factors that characterize a district scenario, such as: refurbishment strategies' selection, combination of passive, active and control measures, the surface to be refurbished and the generation systems to be substituted will highly influence the final impacts of the refurbishment solution. In order to answer this increasing demand and consider all above-mentioned district factors, municipalities need optimisation methods supporting the decision making process at district level scale when defining cost-effective refurbishment scenarios. Furthermore, the optimisation process should enable the evaluation of feasible solutions at district scale taking into account that each district and building has specific boundaries and barriers. Considering these needs, this paper presents a multi-objective approach allowing a simultaneous environmental and economic assessment of refurbishment scenarios at district scale. With the aim at demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a real scenario of Gros district in the city of Donostia-San Sebastian (North of Spain) is presented. After analysing the baseline scenario in terms of energy performance, environmental and economic impacts, the multi-objective Harmony Search algorithm has been employed to assess the goal of reducing the environmental impacts in terms of Global Warming Potential (GWP) and minimizing the investment cost obtaining the best ranking of economic and environmental refurbishment scenarios for the Gros district.
Energy efficiency and environmental performance optimization at the district level are following an upward trend mostly triggered by minimizing the Global Warming Potential (GWP) to 20% by 2020 and 40% by 2030 settled by the European Union (EU) compared with 1990 levels. This paper advances over the state of the art by proposing two novel multi-objective algorithms, named Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) and Multi-Objective Harmony Search (MOHS), aimed at achieving cost-effective energy refurbishment scenarios and allowing at district level the decision-making procedure. This challenge is not trivial since the optimisation process must provide feasible solutions for a simultaneous environmental and economic assessment at district scale taking into consideration highly demanding real-based constraints regarding district and buildings’ specific requirements. Consequently, in this paper, a two-stage optimization methodology is proposed in order to reduce the energy demand and fossil fuel consumption with an affordable investment cost at building level and minimize the total payback time while minimizing the GWP at district level. Aimed at demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed two-stage multi-objective approaches, this work presents simulation results at two real district case studies in Donostia-San Sebastian (Spain) for which up to a 30% of reduction of GWP at district level is obtained for a Payback Time (PT) of 2–3 years.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.