Detailed individual building energy models and regional and country-level building stock models on the other side have become common modes of analysis for building designers and energy policy makers, respectively. More recently, these two toolsets have begun to merge into hybrid methods that are meant to analyze the energy performance of neighborhoods, i.e. several dozens to thousands of buildings. This workshop reviews emerging simulation methods and implementation workflows for bottom-up urban building models. The focus will be on simulation input, energy flow model generation, and result validation.
Over the past decade, building energy models have become common for building designers. Meanwhile, starting from energy simulations, energy policy makers and urban planners have increasingly required to develop bottom-up models to predict the energy consumption of the building stocks at the neighbor or regional scale. Bottom-up models have started to become common instruments to help traditional top-down statistical models to assess the energy needs of the built environment in a disaggregated way. In particular, in the last few years, several new tools have proposed hybrid methods aimed to analyze the energy performance and urban microclimate at both the building and neighborhoods. This workshop will focus on emerging simulation methods for urban building models and urban microclimate modelling. The focus will be on simulation input, energy flow model generation, and result validation. The value of these instruments as tools for supporting smart grid models will be finally discussed.