3D Data Models for Urban Energy Simulation

Sustainable use and management of energy resources is a challenging task for growing urban population. Especially, an urban environment in temperate continental climate consumes high energy resources for their space heating and domestic hot water demands. Assessment of thermal energy requirements for future energy demands is fundamental to sustainable urban environment. Thermal energy demand can be simulated using physical and empirical laws from building physics domain. Physical laws compute thermal energy consumption based on heterogeneous datasets from various data sources. These datasets may include information from cadastre, building registers, inhabitant census, 3D building models, ground surveys and meteorological databases. Furthermore, depending upon availability, accessibility and level of detail, specific simulation methods are usually employed for evaluation of energy consumption at different spatial scales. This paper attempts to identify input data parameters which could facilitate validation and calibration of thermal energy demand based on input data sensitivity using simulation methods.