Urban building energy modeling : A systematic evaluation of modeling and simulation approaches

Abstract: Urban energy system planning can play a pivotal role in the transition of urban areas towards energy efficiency and carbon neutrality. With the building sector being one of the main components of the urban energy system, there is a great opportunity for improving energy efficiency in cities if the spatio-temporal patterns of energy use in the building sector are accurately identified.A bottom-up engineering energy model of buildings, known as urban building energy model (UBEM), is an analytical tool for modeling buildings on city-levels and evaluating scenarios for an energy-efficient built environment, not only on the building-level but also on the district and city-level. Methods for developing an UBEM vary, yet, the majority of existing models use the same approach to incorporating already established building energy simulation software into the main core of the model. Due to difficulties in accessing building-specific information on the one hand, and the computational cost of UBEMs on the other hand, simplified building modeling is the most common method to make the modeling procedure more efficient.This thesis contributes to the state-of-the-art and advancement of the field of urban building energy modeling by analyzing the capabilities of conventional building simulation tools to handle an UBEM and suggesting modeling guidelines on the zoning configuration and levels of detail of the building models.According to the results from this thesis, it is concluded that with 16% relative difference from the annual measurements, EnergyPlus is the most suitable software that can handle large-scale building energy models efficiently. The results also show that on the individual building-level, a simplified single-zone model results in 6% mean absolute percentage deviation (MAPD) from a detailed multi-zone model. This thesis proposes that on the aggregated levels, simplified building models could contribute to the development of a fast but still accurate UBEM.