Multi-actor Urban Energy Planning Support: Building Refurbishment & Building-Integrated Solar PV

Energy strategies are needed at a city level and consequently, adequate planning tools are required to support urban energy planners in assessing their decisions (e.g. which buildings are the best to refurbish). This paper presents an ontology based approach for urban energy planning support. The approach is applied to develop a planning support system for building-refurbishment and building-integrated Photovoltaics-based energy generation. The adopted methodology works as an iterative, incremental process, where each iteration leads to the integration of a new planning decision. The process starts by the identification of the actors whose interests are affected by the decision, then developing/re-using computation models that provide answers for their questions. Different models are integrated using an ontology that represents the parts of the city that are within the scope of the questions to be answered. The system is applied within a district in the city of Vienna covering around 1200 buildings. The adopted approach provides different actors with specific information related to their view point of decision making. Further, the output is aggregated to a common level of abstraction, to be understood by all involved actors. This approach is applicable to different cities, as the ontology also integrates extension and upgrade mechanisms that provide flexibility to cope with different available data collections.