Shadowing Calculation on Urban Areas from Semantic 3D City Models

Nowadays, our society is in the transit to adopt more sustainable energy sources to reduce our impact on the environment; one alternative is solar energy. However, this is highly affected by the surroundings, which might cause shadowing effects. In this paper, we present our method to perform shadowing calculations in urban areas using semantic...

Efficient Solar Potential Estimation of 3D Buildings: 3D BAG as use case

Solar energy is an important renewable energy source that is already generated by millions of solar panels attached to building roofs throughout The Netherlands. Whether a roof is suitablefor solar panels relies on its type, orientation and whether it is put in shadow by a neighbouring object. This means, the higher the solar potential of a roof...

Inferring roof semantics for more accurate solar potential assessment

Led in cooperation with the company Brink, who provides management and consultation services for construction and real estate sectors, this Synthesis Project aims at automatically deriving meaningful information about buildings. More precisely, the focus is to automatically detect roof obstacles - such as dormers, chimneys, and solar panels - to...

Generative Solar-Climatic Configuration: A model for feed-forward optimization of building envelopes as to solar energy potential

The typical solar energy potential simulation workflows used in the AEC industry require an abundance of information regarding the detailed geometry and materialization of the design. These requisites render them incompatible with early-stage design decision-making pertaining to form-finding. By performing solar energy potential simulations at...

Inferring roof semantics for more accurate solar potential assessment

In guiding the energy transition efforts towards renewable energy sources, 3D city models were shown to be useful tools when assessing the annual solar energy generation potential of urban landscapes. However, the simplified roof geometry included in these 3D city models and the lack of additional semantic information about the buildings'...