Empowering urban building energy modeling with city information models: A critical review on the benefits and challenges

Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest in urban building energy modeling (UBEM). UBEM involves estimating, predicting, optimizing, and managing buildings’ thermal performance and energy coat urban scale. However, the availability of sufficient geometric and non-geometric information is widely reported as a main barrier for UBEM applications.

This limitation primarily arises from the challenge of collecting such specific data across hundreds to tens of thousands of large-scale, constructed buildings. UBEM heavily relies on the availability of massive datasets. These datasets must specify the geometries and spatial relationships of buildings, details about the building’s construction, weather data specific to urban microclimate, building usage schedules, occupancy profiles, etc. Based on the literature review, this paper aims to investigate the potential of using existing city information models (CIM) as data sources for UBEM.

This paper reveals and discusses the promising potential of CIMs for data-sharing with UBEM while emphasizing the current challenges associated with integrating CIM data into UBEM. This limitation primarily stems from the fact that CIMs are developed mainly for navigation, urban planning, and management purposes, with less emphasis on building energy-related issues. Moreover, most stock-level UBEM applications depend on the concept of ‘archetypes,’ and this concept may pose a barrier to the UBEM data-sharing approach in the CIM.