SCIENCES

The Smart City Innovations and Experiments using New Climate and Energy Simulations (SCIENCES) project is funded by the European commission and managed by the Delft University of Technology in association with Carnegie Mellon University.

The project aims at contributing to the development of climate neutral and smart cities, which is one of the major EU missions to solve issues related to urbanization and climate change. In this mission, the project primarily focuses on novel methods to simulate interactions between buildings and their outdoor environment at the neighborhood scale that could easily be integrated and exploited into city digital twins. From simulations that could be performed through a city digital twin, architects and urban planners should be able to predict the efficacy of their stratgies in mitigating urban heat islands and reducing emissions of green house gases. To achieve this objective, researchers involved in the SCIENCES project are studying methods of simulation that could:

Be automatically configured from a 3D city model and IoT data. 3D city models and IoT data are two fundamental components of any city digital twin. In a 3D city model, urban morphology is expressed with a high fidelity, which needs to be addressed by the simulation methods. IoT data can be used to calibrate simulations.
Predict outdoor conditions of the built-environment with a high temporal resolution and over a long time horizion. For simulations to make such predictions, the SCIENCES project explores various data driven apporaches that can either be coupled with detailed building energy models or simplified surrogates.
Evaluate strategies to improve outdoor thermal comfort, reduce emissions of green house gases, and minimize the building energy consumption. For this reason, methods studied in the SCIENCES project will be able to simualte the impact of anthropogenic sources of heat and green house gases on the outdoor environment at the neighborhood scale. They will also consider various strategies to mitigate urban heat islands and climate change.