Data Extraction as Input for the Energy analysis of an urban district with UMI.

The energy usage of an urban district has become a major subject of study and interest since we observed a significant expansion of cities caused by the movement of inhabitants. Sustainability of urban areas is mainly related to interactions between street patterns and building distances. Monitoring these connections in terms of energy flows creates possibilities of optimizing building construction and retrofitting. There are many tools used to make this possible.In this paper, we want to demonstrate how it is possible to import the 3D structure of an urban area recorded in an SHP file into the Urban Modeling Interface software. The data extraction protocol we developed to this aim principally consists in approximating clusters of XYZ coordinates into a set of boxes with minimum loss in geometry, orientation, and position of buildings. Estimations of energy consumption and CO2 are among the outcomes we were able to obtain from imported data into UMI. Using the developed data extraction strategy, we can potentially analyze the energy usage of an entire city.