Developing an Integrated Household Transportation, Residential and Commercial Building Energy Consumption Model: Investigating the Integrated Application of Transportation, Residential and Commercial Prediction Models in Urban Planning

Developing an Integrated Household Transportation, Residential and Commercial Building Energy Consumption Model: Investigating the Integrated Application of Transportation, Residential and Commercial Prediction Models in Urban Planning
Author: Shideh Shams Amiri
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre: Architectural Engineering
ISBN:

The building and transportation sectors account for approximately 75% of CO2 emissions. Accurate forecasts of future energy usage are an important step towards reaching carbon mitigation commitments for city policymakers. Beyond identifying sources of emission intensity for a region, the forecast mechanism must be capable of compensating for gaps in available data and of accounting for the uncertainties behind the dynamics of an urban system. By considering a range of possible scenarios, the prediction model can identify recurring sources of high energy consumption and fine-tune areas of priority with incoming data. Although there are many studies dedicated to modeling techniques for predicting household building energy consumption, very few focus on household transportation energy consumption using household variables. Buildings connect different networks of transportation and influence transit patterns. Developing a robust and integrated residential, commercial, and transportation energy use model is useful for multiple planning purposes. This is crucial for future urban development; there is a critical need to analyze the integrated impacts of transportation infrastructure and building construction on the environment. Machine learning techniques in artificial intelligence (AI) predictive modeling have become popular in energy prediction due to their ability to capture nonlinear and complex relationships. Nevertheless, developing a comprehensive understanding of the inference mechanisms in AI models and ensuring trust in their predictions is challenging. This is because AI models are mostly of high complexity and low interpretability. There is a need to analyze the insights of energy models to interpret local and global features and to demonstrate how existing bottom-up approaches can augment scenario planning forecasts. This dissertation will address the abovementioned integration needs and interpretability challenges in the following four steps: (1) Examine four machine learning approaches for predicting household transportation energy consumption. These are decision trees, random forest, neural networks, and elastic net regularization analyses. These models will be compared in terms of both accuracy and interpretability. This step aims to determine the best ML application for transportation energy models. (2) Predict residential and commercial building energy demand by generating bottom-up models using datasets commonly available in the United States. (a) The residential model applies machine learning methods to match records in the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) with Public Use Microdata samples. This produces a synthetic household energy distribution at the neighborhood scale. (b) The commercial building energy model is generated by training machine learning models on national data from the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS). Commercial building energy consumption is predicted at the building and household level in order to aggregate it with the residential (step 2a) and transportation models (step 1). (3) Evaluate model transparency and explainability for the residential, commercial, and transportation models produced in steps 1 and 2. The application of Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanation (LIME) and SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) will support advanced machine learning techniques in the transportation and building energy research. (4) Analyze the impact of alternative policy scenarios on urban energy consumption. Sustainability scenarios will be constructed from available projections of demographic and socioeconomic data for Philadelphia County. The goal of this step is to apply urban planning priorities to our models to inform our understanding of their predicted environmental outcomes. This project extends urban energy analysis by developing AI and XAI techniques for the three most energy intensive sectors of urban development. The integrated assessment of the transportation, residential and commercial sectors is critical to assessing and prioritizing urban planning scenarios for sustainable urban growth. These results are essential in decision-making among urban planners and building and transportation engineers.

Simulation of Household In-home and Transportation Energy Use

Simulation of Household In-home and Transportation Energy Use
Author: Feifei Yu (S.M.)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN:

Household in-home activities and out-of-home transportation are two major sources of urban energy consumption. In light of China's rapid urbanization and income growth, changing lifestyles and consumer patterns - evident in increased ownership of appliances and motor vehicles - will have a large impact on residential energy use in the future. The pattern of growth of Chinese cities may also play an intertwined role in influencing and being influenced by consumption patterns and, thus energy use. Nonetheless, models for evaluating energy demand often neglect the evolution of appliance & vehicle ownership and directly correlate consumption with static characteristics without explicit behavioral links. In this thesis I aim to provide a comprehensive method for understanding household energy behavior over time. Using household survey data and neighborhood form characteristics from Jinan, a mid-sized Chinese city, I explore the relationship between neighborhood design and household-level behaviors and their impact on final energy consumption. My ultimate goal is to provide the modeling engine for the "Energy Proforma©" a tool intended to help developers, designers, and policy-makers implement more energy-efficient neighborhoods. To predict in-home and transportation energy use, and their trade-offs, I develop an integrated household-level micro-simulation framework. The simulation tool is based on a total of eight inter-related behavioral models which estimate out-of-home energy use by predicting trip generation, mode choice and trip length for each household and in-home energy use according to different energy sources. In the various sub-models, relevant dimensions of neighborhood form and design are included as explanatory variables. These models are then combined with modules that update household demographics, appliance & vehicle ownership information, and activity trade-off patterns. These inter-linked models can then be used to estimate the long-term effects of neighborhood design on household energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Unlike separate in-home or out-of-home energy demand models, I develop an integrated simulation framework for forecasting. It captures estimated trade-off effects between in-home and transportation energy-consuming behaviors. The approach produces indicators of detailed behavioral outcomes such as trip mode and trip length choice, making it easier to relate policies, such as mode-oriented strategies, to ultimate outcomes of interest. I ultimately aim to provide urban designers, developers, and policy makers a decision support tool to explore and compare long-term energy performance across proposed neighborhood development projects.

Energy and Climate in the Urban Built Environment

Energy and Climate in the Urban Built Environment
Author: M. Santamouris
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 627
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 113425797X

Both the number and percentage of people living in urban areas is growing rapidly. Up to half of the world's population is expected to be living in a city by the end of the century and there are over 170 cities in the world with populations over a million. Cities have a huge impact on the local climate and require vast quantities of energy to keep them functioning. The urban environment in turn has a big impact on the performance and needs of buildings. The size, scale and mechanism of these interactions is poorly understood and strategies to mitigate them are rarely implemented. This is the first comprehensive book to address these questions. It arises out of a programme of work (POLISTUDIES) carried out for the Save programme of the European Commission. Chapters describe not only the main problems encountered such as the heat island and canyon effects, but also a range of design solutions that can be adopted both to improve the energy performance and indoor air quality of individual buildings and to look at aspects of urban design that can reduce these climatic effects. The book concludes with some examples of innovative urban bioclimatic buildings. The project was co-ordinated by Professor Mat Santamouris from the University of Athens who is also the editor of the book. Other contributions are from the University of Thessaloniki, Greece, ENTPE, Lyons, France and the University of Stuttgart, Germany.

Effective Tracking of Building Energy Use

Effective Tracking of Building Energy Use
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2012-03-30
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0309254043

The United States is responsible for nearly one-fifth of the world's energy consumption. Population growth, and the associated growth in housing, commercial floor space, transportation, goods, and services is expected to cause a 0.7 percent annual increase in energy demand for the foreseeable future. The energy used by the commercial and residential sectors represents approximately 40 percent of the nation's total energy consumption, and the share of these two sectors is expected to increase in the future. The Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) and Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) are two major surveys conducted by the Energy Information Administration. The surveys are the most relevant sources of data available to researchers and policy makers on energy consumption in the commercial and residential sectors. Many of the design decisions and operational procedures for the CBECS and RECS were developed in the 1970s and 1980s, and resource limitations during much of the time since then have prevented EIA from making significant changes to the data collections. Effective Tracking of Building Energy Use makes recommendations for redesigning the surveys based on a review of evolving data user needs and an assessment of new developments in relevant survey methods.

Modeling of Transport Processes for the Reduction of Energy Use in Commercial Buildings

Modeling of Transport Processes for the Reduction of Energy Use in Commercial Buildings
Author: Jordan Douglas Clark
Publisher:
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN:

Buildings are responsible for over a third of the energy consumption in the United States annually. This energy consumption contributes to some of the most pressing problems facing our society. Modeling of buildings and their systems is an integral part of most strategies for reduction of energy use in buildings. Modeling allows for informed building designs, optimization of systems, and greater market acceptance of new energy-saving technologies. This work addresses two particular modeling applications concerned with reduction of energy usage in buildings: convective heat transfer modeling in perimeter zones, and liquid desiccant dehumidification modeling. The first objective of this work is concerned with modeling convective transport in buildings and creation of inputs for energy modeling programs and passive pollutant removal calculations. This is accomplished through four investigations. In the first investigation, the influence of floor diffusers on convection heat transfer at perimeter zone windows in commercial buildings is measured. In the second, the impact of blinds on convection under a variety of circumstances is quantified. In the third, movement of air jets issuing from floor diffusers is predicted, and the effect of buoyancy on convective heat transfer at perimeter zone surfaces is analyzed. In the fourth investigation, convective mass transfer at indoor surfaces is investigated. Full scale experiments were conducted in support of these four investigations and semi-empirical correlations vii consistent with theory are given to predict jet movement and convective transport under a variety of circumstances. The second objective of this dissertation is concerned with modeling and analysis of liquid desiccant dehumidification systems and is pursued through three additional investigations. The first is concerned with modeling small-scale transport within the channels of a liquid desiccant absorber and regenerator. Physical and empirical models are developed which agree well with laboratory data. During the second investigation, a dynamic model of a liquid desiccant dehumidification system is developed and integrated into a full-building energy simulation. This is used to assess the potential applicability of the system in supermarkets in various climates. The models developed are used to optimize the system and develop a procedure to size components in the final investigation.

Building Performance Simulation for Design and Operation

Building Performance Simulation for Design and Operation
Author: Jan L.M. Hensen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 538
Release: 2012-09-10
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1134026358

Effective building performance simulation can reduce the environmental impact of the built environment, improve indoor quality and productivity, and facilitate future innovation and technological progress in construction. It draws on many disciplines, including physics, mathematics, material science, biophysics and human behavioural, environmental and computational sciences. The discipline itself is continuously evolving and maturing, and improvements in model robustness and fidelity are constantly being made. This has sparked a new agenda focusing on the effectiveness of simulation in building life-cycle processes. Building Performance Simulation for Design and Operation begins with an introduction to the concepts of performance indicators and targets, followed by a discussion on the role of building simulation in performance-based building design and operation. This sets the ground for in-depth discussion of performance prediction for energy demand, indoor environmental quality (including thermal, visual, indoor air quality and moisture phenomena), HVAC and renewable system performance, urban level modelling, building operational optimization and automation. Produced in cooperation with the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA), and featuring contributions from fourteen internationally recognised experts in this field, this book provides a unique and comprehensive overview of building performance simulation for the complete building life-cycle from conception to demolition. It is primarily intended for advanced students in building services engineering, and in architectural, environmental or mechanical engineering; and will be useful for building and systems designers and operators.

Real Prospects for Energy Efficiency in the United States

Real Prospects for Energy Efficiency in the United States
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2010-06-10
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0309156866

America's economy and lifestyles have been shaped by the low prices and availability of energy. In the last decade, however, the prices of oil, natural gas, and coal have increased dramatically, leaving consumers and the industrial and service sectors looking for ways to reduce energy use. To achieve greater energy efficiency, we need technology, more informed consumers and producers, and investments in more energy-efficient industrial processes, businesses, residences, and transportation. As part of the America's Energy Future project, Real Prospects for Energy Efficiency in the United States examines the potential for reducing energy demand through improving efficiency by using existing technologies, technologies developed but not yet utilized widely, and prospective technologies. The book evaluates technologies based on their estimated times to initial commercial deployment, and provides an analysis of costs, barriers, and research needs. This quantitative characterization of technologies will guide policy makers toward planning the future of energy use in America. This book will also have much to offer to industry leaders, investors, environmentalists, and others looking for a practical diagnosis of energy efficiency possibilities.