Italian prototype building models for urban scale building performance simulation

Abstract

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.

Neighborhood Energy Modeling and Monitoring: A Case Study

“…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.…”

“…Energies 2021, 14, x FOR PEER REVIEW 2 of 20 challenges: (i) modeling the built environment to simulate the neighborhood energy dynamics [21][22][23][24], 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.…”

Large scale energy analysis and renovation strategies for social housing in the historic city of Venice

“…The novelty of this study concerns the first UBEM application of a recent study published by Carnieletto et al [32], that investigated the Italian building stock and developed representative prototype buildings. The case study presented is a particular social-housing residential district in the historic center of Venice (Italy) composed of 57 buildings.…”

Open-Source Tool for Transforming CityGML Levels of Detail

“…Their article also emphasises that the usage, enrichment and further storage of enriched open datasets in the form of CityGML Energy ADE and gbXML will help simulation scientists in efficiently developing, validating and maintaining energy simulation workflows and tools. Moreover, due to a lack of availability and simplified geometrical approaches, Carnieletto et al [94] recently highlighted the difficulties in calibrating and validating UBEM-based approaches using models developed in CityGML, GeoJSON, CityJSON. Rosser et al [95] also mention that it is challenging to develop urban housing stock models for energy simulation as it requires a range of information for accurately representing the characteristics of each building.…”