Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

District level zero or low carbon concepts require integrated modeling approaches for the building sector consumption, the urban waste and water infrastructure, the energy supply and distribution systems and the energy requirements from local transport. Mathematical models for dynamic building performance analysis, energy generation and storage including waste water and waste to energy systems and network-based distributions need to be adaptable on both a spatial scale from building to district to the city and temporal scales. While there has been abundant research on building scale energy modeling in the last decades with many available and validated tools, much work is still needed to address combined energy modeling of different sectors in a city. The long-term objective of the proposed research program is to deliver an integrated urban modeling and data analytics framework for sustainable and resilient city planning and operation. Such a framework requires the modeling and analysis of the main energy-consuming sectors in the city, i.e. the built environment, network, urban waste and water infrastructure, industrial and commercial activities and transportation. The short-term research objectives are as follows: - Development of new mathematical optimization models and control strategies for multi-scale applications at the urban scale - Development of integrated modelling approaches for different sector coupling - Real-time monitoring database creation and development of data analytics frameworks using dynamic data-driven models and machine learning for knowledge discovery - Development of smart energy management systems. - Test the strategies, methods, and tools in real case studies of different scales The development goal of an open-source urban data management and modeling platform is to create an international community of next-generation cities modelers that cooperate on the complex task of integrating supply, demand and distribution network electricity models across the sectors. The platform should make it easy to develop and integrate new features from the data, modeling or visualization domain and contribute to net zero carbon city transformation strategies.