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...

Introducing the 3DCityDB-Tools Plug-In for QGIS

This paper introduces a new plug-in for QGIS that allows to connect to the free and open-source 3D City Database to load CityGML data, structured as classic GIS layers, into QGIS. The user is therefore not required to be a CityGML specialist, or a SQL expert, as the plug-in takes care of hiding from the user most of the complexity in terms of...

Mapping the CityGML Energy ADE to CityGML 3.0 Using a Model-Driven Approach

With the increasing adoption of semantic 3D city models, the relevance of applications in the field of Urban Building Energy Modelling (UBEM) has rapidly grown, as the building sector accounts for a large part of the total energy consumption. UBEM allows us to better understand the energy performance of the building stock and can contribute to...

Findings in the calculation of solar irradiance in urban areas using several GIS tools

Current GIS software offer tools to perform the solar irradiance calculations. However, these computations based their work on data assumptions or generalisations to speed up their processing time. In this work, a method is shown to perform the calculation using very high and very low spatial resolution open datasets. The results show that there...

Comparison and evaluation of different gis software tools to estimate solar irradiation

In this paper, five commonly used software tools to estimate solar radiation in the urban context (GRASS GIS, ArcGIS, SimStadt, CitySim and Ladybug) are run on the same test site and are compared in terms of input data requirements, usability, and accuracy of the results. Spatial and weather data have been collected for an area located in the...

On the Influence of Party Walls for Urban Energy Modelling

In the last 15 years semantic 3D city models have seen a steady growth in terms of creation and adoption. Many cities world-wide have now at least one city model which can be used for several applications. Energy- and sustainability-related topics are among those that have experienced a noteworthy increase of interest from the Geomatics...

Development and Testing of the CityJSON Energy Extension for Space heating Demand Calculation

3D city models are frequently used to acquire and store energy-related information of buildings for energy applications. In this context, CityGML is the most common data model, and the Energy ADE, one of its most complex extensions, provides a systematic way of storing detailed energy-related data in XML format. Contrarily, even though...

Creation of a CityGML-Based 3D City Model Testbed for Energy-Related Appications

This document introduces the process for the creation of a testbed for energy applications based on a semantic 3D city model for the municipality of Rijssen-Holten in The Netherlands. The creation of this dataset requires the consolidation from multiple data sources as well as a lot of manual work so the authors can warranty as much as...

Testing the new 3D bag dataset for energy demand estimation of residential buildings

The 3D BAG v. 2.0 dataset has been recently released: it is a country-wide dataset containing all buildings in the Netherlands, modelled in multiple LoDs (LoD1.2, LoD1.3 and LoD2.2). In particular, the LoD2.2 allows differentiating between different thematic surfaces composing the building envelope. This paper describes the first steps to...

Volume comparison of automatically reconstructed multi-lod building models for urban planning applications

3D city models are playing a growing role worldwide as sources of integrated information upon which different urban applications are developed. In the context of urban planning and design, semantic 3D city models can provide plenty of qualitative and quantitative information about the urban context and of the area(s) to be transformed. This...