2nd European SimStadt Workshop at Saxion Hogeschool in Enschede / NL

11 March 2020 Reading time Minutes

On the 11th of March, the team working on the ELISE Use Case “Comparative analysis of different methodologies and datasets for Energy Performance Labelling of buildings” organized the 2nd European SimStadt workshop at the Saxion Hogeschool in Enschede, hosted by the Saxion research group “Sustainable Building Technology (SBT)”.

SimStadt is a workflow-driven urban energy simulation platform for CityGML city models enabling solar potential- , heating demand- , environmental- and district heating network analysis. Linking urban simulation platforms to CityGML models allows the use of geospatial information to enrich data models to be used for scenario analysis, e.g. related to energy transition. However, the rapid and widespread development of applications and tools requires the European Commission to focus on harmonization measures for data formats.

Within ELISE, the European Location Interoperability Solutions for e-government initiative, a number of pilot projects are executed with the aim to test principles in practice, offer lessons and resources for others to build upon, provide the basis for a widespread rollout, and show the benefits of location interoperability. One of the pilot projects executed under the ELISE “Energy & Location Applications” is the Use-Case: “Comparative analysis of different methodologies and datasets for Energy Performance Labelling of buildings”.

The use case is supported by five institutions (Kadaster, Saxion Hogeaschool, CARTIF, Hochschule Stuttgart, Joint Research Centre) from four countries (The Netherlands, Germany, Spain & Italy). The aim of the use-case is twofold:

To make a comparative analysis of different methodologies for Energy Performance Labelling of buildings, applied to sample datasets of buildings of DE, NL and ES.
To make the analysis results re-usable in other geographical areas (Member States) by parties aiming to assess the energy performance labels of their building stock and interested to preliminary assess costs & benefits of applying the same (or similar) methodologies based on the availability of similar datasets, with respect to those used in the comparative analysis.

INSPIRE BU 3D and CityGML data formats for determining energy labels on district scale in four test areas [Essen (DE), Zwolle (NL), Enschede (NL) and Valladolid (ES)] will be exploited, using SimStadt as urban energy simulation reference platform. The experience from the comparative analysis using the above mentioned data formats will be documented and shared within the ELISE community.

During the morning session of the workshop four expert presented their research and development activities predicting energy labels with SimStadt on the different case studies, namely Prof. Dr. Volker Coors & Eric Duminil [Hochschule Stuttgart / D]; Matthias Fitsky [New York University / Abu Dhabi] en Gema Hernández Moral [CARTIF / ES)]. In the afternoon the 38 participants ranging from PhD students to industry partners were given the opportunity to trial the simulation platform on the Dutch case of Enschede. The user-friendliness of the workflow driven user interface of SimStadt surprised even the novice users of SimStadt. The next step will be to complete the simulation of the case studies and to compare the simulation results on three different levels: (1) Level of detail of the geometrical data: impact of LOD on prediction accuracy; (2) Intermodel comparison: accuracy assessment between simulation models on city and building scale (monthly and hourly averages) and (3) Absolute performance prediction: comparison of predicted and measured data (multi- and single building scale).