AN INTEGRATED PARAMETRIC GENERATION AND COMPUTATIONAL WORKFLOW TO SUPPORT SUSTAINABLE CITY PLANNING Evaluate decarbonisation scenarios in the city of Sheffield

Abstract

To examine how efforts in the built environment can contribute to global climate change mitigation at the urban scale, urban building energy modelling (UBEM) is one of the research areas gaining increasing interest in recent years. However, limited studies systematically illustrate a comprehensive UBEM workflow for most architects and urban planners considering available public datasets, particularly at the early conceptual design phase. In current UBEM studies, major challenges arise from the lack of fine-grained measured urban data and incompatibility between software. To address these challenges and support future sustainable cities and communities, this paper proposed a streamlined computational workflow of UBEM to facilitate sustainable urban design development. Through a case study of Sheffield in the UK, this paper demonstrated an automated and standardised computational workflow that can test the decarbonisation potential in built environments by evaluating energy demand and supply scenarios at an urban scale. This workflow is envisaged to be applicable at various scales of an urban region given an appropriate geographic information system (GIS) dataset.