An Overview Of Urban Building Energy Modelling (UBEM) Tools

Ferrando, Martina; Causone, Francesco

doi:10.26868/25222708.2019.210632

Cited by 14 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…The current challenge of applied research relates to the management of groups of buildings together, in order to improve the overall efficiency of a neighborhood and its integration with the city's energy networks (power grid, district heating and cooling, data networks) [19,20]. This broad challenge includes a series of sub-challenges: (i) modeling the built environment to simulate the neighborhood energy dynamics [21][22][23][24], Energies 2021, 14, 3716 2 of 19 both for new constructions and for existing ones, (ii) planning an adequate monitoring and management, (iii) deploying the plan by integrating existing buildings with and energy management system (EMS), i.e., a platform allowing the visualization (dashboard) of monitored data, and some sort of control.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neighborhood Energy Modeling and Monitoring: A Case Study

et al. 2021

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Cities and nations worldwide are pledging to energy and carbon neutral objectives that imply a huge contribution from buildings. High-performance targets, either zero energy or zero carbon, are typically difficult to be reached by single buildings, but groups of properly-managed buildings might reach these ambitious goals. For this purpose we need tools and experiences to model, monitor, manage and optimize buildings and their neighborhood-level systems. The paper describes the activities pursued for the deployment of an advanced energy management system for a multi-carrier energy grid of an existing neighborhood in the area of Milan. The activities included: (i) development of a detailed monitoring plan, (ii) deployment of the monitoring plan, (iii) development of a virtual model of the neighborhood and simulation of the energy performance. Comparisons against early-stage energy monitoring data proved promising and the generation system showed high efficiency (EER equal to 5.84), to be further exploited.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neighborhood Energy Modeling and Monitoring: A Case Study

et al. 2021

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“…In particular, several bottom-up physics-based UBEM tools were developed in recent years [8]. Among the main ones,…”

Section: Possible Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Conversely, UBEM models at least a large block (i.e., dozens of buildings) and up to all buildings in a city (ranging from tens of thousands to millions of buildings). When dealing with such a large number of buildings, dataset development and computational efforts can be challenging, and thus, a few approaches emerged to better describe the buildings to ensure affordable labor and computational efforts [8].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Italian prototype building models for urban scale building performance simulation

Carnieletto

Ferrando

Teso

et al. 2021

Building and Environment

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Urban building energy modeling (UBEM) seeks to evaluate strategies to optimize building energy use at urban scale to support a city's building energy goals. Prototype building models are usually developed to represent typical urban building characteristics of a specific use type, construction year, and climate zone, as detailed characteristics of individual buildings at urban scale are difficult to obtain. This study investigated the Italian building stock, developing 46 building prototypes, based on construction year, for residential and office buildings. The study included 16 single-family buildings, 16 multi-family buildings, and 14 office buildings. Building envelope properties and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system characteristics were defined according to existing building energy codes and standards for climatic zone E, which covers about half the Italian municipalities. Novel contributions of this study include (1) detailed specifications of prototype building energy models for Italian residential and office buildings that can be adopted by UBEM tools, and (2) a dataset in GeoJSON format of Italian urban buildings compiled from diverse data sources and national standards. The developed prototype building specifications, the building dataset, and the workflow can be applied to create other building prototypes and to support Italian national building energy efficiency and environmental goals.

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“…The UBEM approaches are usually divided into two main categories [20,21,36]: top-down and bottom-up ( Figure 1). The top-down models do not need any specific data related to each single building, they can estimate the energy consumption of buildings from long-term relationships that link the energy used by buildings and some drivers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban building energy modeling (UBEM) tools: A state-of-the-art review of bottom-up physics-based approaches

Ferrando

Causone

Hong

et al. 2020

Sustainable Cities and Society

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Regulations corroborate the importance of retrofitting existing building stocks or constructing new energy-efficient districts. There is, thus, a need for modeling tools to evaluate energy scenarios to better manage and design cities, and numerous methodologies and tools have been developed. Among them, Urban Building Energy Modelling (UBEM) tools allow the energy simulation of buildings at large scales. Choosing an appropriate UBEM tool, balancing the level of complexity, accuracy, usability, and computing needs, remains a challenge for users. The review focuses on the main bottom-up physics-based UBEM tools, comparing them from a user-oriented perspective. Five categories are used: (i) the required inputs, (ii) the reported outputs, (iii) the exploited workflow, (iv) the applicability of each tool, and (v) the potential users. Moreover, a critical discussion is proposed, focusing on interests and trends in research and development. The results highlighted major differences between UBEM tools that must be considered to choose the proper one for an application. Barriers of adoption of UBEM tools include the needs of a standardized ontology, a common threedimensional city model, a standard procedure to collect data, and a standard set of test cases. This feeds into future development of UBEM tools to support cities' sustainability goals.

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An Overview Of Urban Building Energy Modelling (UBEM) Tools

Cited by 14 publications

References 29 publications

Neighborhood Energy Modeling and Monitoring: A Case Study

Neighborhood Energy Modeling and Monitoring: A Case Study

Italian prototype building models for urban scale building performance simulation

Urban building energy modeling (UBEM) tools: A state-of-the-art review of bottom-up physics-based approaches

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