Towards an automated generator of urban building energy loads from 3D building models

Buildings in cities are one of the major contributors of carbon emissions worldwide. Thus improving building energy efficiency is one of the key strategies towards sustainable urbanization. Urban building energy modeling (UBEM) is a valuable methodology to tackle these challenges, as it provides users with the energy demand of the building stock, scenarios evaluation, peak loads and other useful analyses. This paper presents an open-source tool to automatically convert 3D building models into ready-to-run Modelica models for urban energy simulations. The software enables users to create 3D building geometries, perform data enrichment and execute model generation of ready-to-run reduced order Modelica models. The software is written in Python and it has been developed as an add-on for the 3D creation application Blender. The first part of the paper describes the general approach and the architecture of the tool. In the second part, a demonstration of the tool’s capabilities is illustrated.