A Multi-stage Approach to Understand GIS Model Enrichment Used for Decision-Making Support When Developing Energy Retrofit Strategies on a Neighborhood Level

In the AEC sector, energy performance targets of buildings continuously increase for contributing to reduce carbon dioxide. This is usually done on building level, but the focus continuously shifts to larger scales such as neighborhoods, e.g. for identifying buildings with the most retrofitting potential. For this, low detailed GIS models can serve as a basis for energy simulations and are broadly available. However, neighborhood energy simulations hold many challenges, such as the lack of accurate and sufficient data to perform reliable simulations. Information such as window positions or thermal parameters of the building elements can thereby help to increase the quality of the energy simulation results. Therefore, in this paper, challenges of data collection are presented and discussed. To enable users to find a trade-off between accuracy and reliability of a neighborhood simulation and the effort to provide this data, the authors developed the concept of the Neighborhood Model States (NMS). Furthermore, occurring challenges in enriching the GIS model for each NMS are discussed on the example of buildings from the UBC campus.