Building Stock Energy Models and ICT Solutions for Urban Energy Systems

The existing building stock presents a high potential of energy savings and CO2 emissions reductions. To this purpose, literature provides novel city-scale building-oriented studies, aimed at developing suitable tools for stakeholders, city planners, and decision-makers. To achieve an effective urban energy planning, urban energy systems (UES) models are developed; they employ a multi-domain approach, embracing the complex interactions in urban areas, such as energy flows, environmental indicators, social and economic factors. To perform an advanced modelling and to simulate the complexity of the UES, ICT (information and communications technology) represents nowadays the right answer to the needs of integration of data, tools, and actors in different domains. The chapter investigates the current studies in the field of building stock energy modeling and the application of advanced technologies to develop UES models. As an exemplification, the technological approach followed in the SEMANCO project to support urban scale energy modelling is presented.