Advancements and Internships in Urban Building Energy Simulation

[prudhomm]

Advancements and Internships in Urban Building Energy Simulation

New York: the Financial District, Battery Park, and the southern tip of Manhattan Island, where the Hudson and East Rivers converge

Roadmap and Recent Achievements

The HiDALGO2 project is progressing steadily, with significant advancements in urban building energy simulations and CI/CD methodologies. Our recent paper, Ktirio Urban Building: A Computational Framework for City Energy Simulations Enhanced by CI/CD Innovations on EuroHPC Systems, has been accepted for PPAM 2024. This work highlights the critical role of the building sector in the European Union, emphasizing the need for improved energy efficiency and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. The EU's Horizon 2050 initiative sets ambitious renovation goals, and the CoE HiDALGO2 project supports these through the Urban Building pilot application. This application leverages high-performance computing solutions and advanced CI/CD methodologies to streamline simulation and deployment across EuroHPC JU supercomputers.

The Urban Building pilot is also a demonstrator for the French exascale initiative NumPEx and researchers are part of the Exa-MA project on Methods and Algorithms.

Team

The current team is composed as follows

• Vincent Chabannes @vincentchabannes - HPC, modeling and simulation, gui, design
• Gwennolé Chappron @GwennoleChappron - Building energy modeling and simulation
• Javier Cladellas @JavierCladellas - Data analyst, modeling and simulation
• Patrick Lemoine @lemoinep - Parallel task and GPU programming
• Maryam Maslek @maslekm - Meteorology modeling, data analysis and transfer
• Philippe Pincon @Philand - Modeling and simulation
• Christophe Prud'homme @prudhomm - Leader, HPC, modeling and simulation, design

We collaborate closely with Pierre Alliez's team at INRIA (@palliez) on the computational geometry aspects of the project, leveraging the CGAL library for advanced modeling and simulation.

Summary of Advances:

1. Context and Objectives:

   • Transition from Building Energy Modeling (BEM) to City Energy Modeling (CEM) to accurately assess energy performance, identify energy savings, compare renovation strategies, and ensure optimal building management.
   • The building sector in the EU contributes significantly to GHG emissions and energy consumption, with Horizon 2050 objectives aiming to double annual energy renovation rates.

2. Objectives:

   • Predict energy consumption, thermal comfort, and indoor air quality at both building and urban scales.
   • Integrate the building stock with its environment by coupling with the Urban Air Pollution (UAP) model to improve boundary conditions and radiative heat transfer.
   • Simulate large scale cities (below the city of New York with a Zoom on Central Park and at the top of the blog a view of the Financial District, Battery Park, and the southern tip of Manhattan Island, where the Hudson and East Rivers converge)

City of New York

3. Current Workflow and Recent Work:
   • Updated Ktirio.GUI with weather processing, new graphic controls, and upgraded workflows.
   • Improved simulation launches and configurations, initiated automation of city report generation, and developed first models of heating systems.
   • Published results of UB simulations in a gallery of buildings and cities with automatically generated reports for city-scale metrics.

4. Performance and Benchmarking:

   • Scalability tests on EuroHPC systems showed consistent performance profiles with new features.
   • Identified solutions for I/O performance improvements planned for the end of the year.

5. CI/CD Pipeline:

   • Complex toolchain for packaging, releasing, and documentation, with HPC benchmarking using Reframe for regression testing.

Next Steps:

1. Short-Term Goals (Summer 2024):

   • Modeling: Improve city geometry reconstruction, support buildings with more than 10 floors and heating systems, and enhance weather processing in Ktirio.GUI.
   • Reporting: Implement multi-scale reporting for energy consumption and comfort indicators.
   • Computing/Performance: Add more timing information for better profiling data.
   • CI/CD: Add checks for runner status, deploy only if online, and robustify the process.
   • Coupling: Add initial support for coupling UB with UAP, supporting HPDA and ML.
   • Release: Release the Ktirio Urban Building platform components.

2. Long-Term Goals (End of 2024):

   • Modeling: Improve vegetation support, watertight meshes, roof support, LOD2, and building energy simulation.
   • Computing/Performance: Initial support for hybrid computing using CPU and GPU, improve I/O performance, and advanced partitioning.
   • CI/CD: Robustify workflow, include report processing, and support new EuroHPC systems.
   • Coupling: Support two-way coupling using frameworks like MUSCLE3 and pre-processing pipelines for AI and ML applications.

3. Exploitation and Valorization:

   • Collaboration with partners like Synapse Concept and Cisco Meraki for data access and deployment of Meraki sensors for validation and data assimilation.
   • Preparing a beta test of the platform with potential customers and testing the GUI and simulation workflow.

Summary:

The UB pilot within the HiDALGO2 project has made significant progress in urban energy modeling and simulation, including improved workflows, enhanced simulation tools, and established CI/CD pipelines. Future steps focus on further modeling enhancements, performance improvements, robust CI/CD integration, and expanded coupling with other models to support comprehensive urban sustainability and energy efficiency goals.

Internship Projects

We have four exciting internship projects under the HiDALGO2 and NumPEx Exa-MA initiatives, focusing on various aspects of urban building energy simulation and 3D modeling. Here’s a summary of each project:

Internship 1: Generating LOD-1 Representation of Buildings Using CGAL

Intern: Dorian Geraldes Pereira (Master 1 CSMI)
Advisors: Vincent Chabannes and Pierre Alliez

Overview:
This project is part of the ExaMA and HiDALGO2 initiatives, where Cemosis aims to implement new tools to improve Urban Energy Simulation. Our work focuses on generating 3D models of buildings. The goal of this internship is to develop a geometric reconstruction tool for LOD1 buildings. This level considers buildings as collections of polygons extruded by height, with specifications for roof shapes. Based on this information, we aim to reconstruct a 3D mesh that adheres to geometric conformity constraints.

Key Objectives:

• Generation of a surface mesh representing the building's external envelope.
• Addition of internal walls delimiting exterior walls and any slabs for each floor.
• Roof modeling.
• Creation of a 3D building volume mesh (structure and/or indoor air).
• Mesh adaptation: quality control of the produced meshes.
• Combining different parts of a building to accurately represent more complex shapes.

More details > here

Internship 2: Generating LOD-2 Representation of Buildings Using CGAL Kinetic Algorithm

Intern: Demuth Axel (Master 1 CSMI)
Advisors: Vincent Chabannes and Pierre Alliez

Overview:
This project aims to improve the Ktirio Urban Building application by implementing new methods for the 3D reconstruction of buildings. The goal is to add new tools for the geometric reconstruction of LOD-2 building models, generating 3D models with constraints of conformity and watertightness. For this purpose, we are using an algorithm developed by the INRIA Titane Team called Kinetic Surface Reparation (KSR), implemented in the CGAL library, and we aim to adapt it for use within our environment.

More details > here

Internship 3: Vegetation Project

Intern: Pierre-Antoine SENGER (Master 1 CSMI)
Advisors: Vincent Chabannes, Pierre Alliez, and Christophe Prud'homme

Overview:
This project integrates vegetation, particularly trees, into 3D geometric models of urban environments to improve the accuracy and realism of thermal and energy simulations. It involves extracting tree meta-data from OpenStreetMap using cpr, generating 3D tree models using CGAL and Gmsh, and integrating these models into existing terrain meshes while optimizing and parallelizing the algorithms for large datasets.

More details > here

Internship 4: Generating Urban Landscape Meshes Using CGAL

Intern: Giulio Carpi Lapi
Advisors: Vincent Chabannes, Pierre Alliez, Christos Georgiadis

Overview:
This internship focuses on improving the approach to terrain mesh generation, representing the ground surface and its elevation. The goal is to reduce the mesh size by sourcing elevation data from Mapbox and reconstructing the mesh using constrained Delaunay triangulation. This will result in more efficient meshes, particularly in flat or nearly flat areas.

More details > here.

Conclusion

The HiDALGO2 project is making significant strides in urban building energy simulations, supported by innovative methodologies and high-performance computing. Our recent paper and the ongoing internship projects reflect our commitment to advancing this field, providing valuable tools and insights for urban planners and policymakers. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to develop and implement these cutting-edge solutions.

Acknowledgements

Funded by the European Union. This work has received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and Poland, Germany, Spain, Hungary, France, and Greece under grant agreement number 101093457. This publication expresses the opinions of the authors and not necessarily those of the EuroHPC JU and Associated Countries which are not responsible for any use of the information contained in this publication

As part of the "France 2030" initiative, this work has benefited from a national grant managed by the French National Research Agency (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) attributed to the Exa-MA project of the NumPEx PEPR program, under the reference ANR-22-EXNU-0002.