Within the framework of the Climate-KIC funded projects 3DGPC and DeepDive Green Moabit, a joint collaboration between virtualcitySYSTEMS GmbH, the European Institute for Energy Research (EIFER), Électricité de France (EDF), and the Chair for Sustainable Planning and Urban Design at the TU Berlin developed a demonstrator for a web-based energy simulation platform.

The simulation scenarios are based on the discussion about the replacement of streetlamps (existing gas lamps vs LED lamps) and the real test in the district of Moabit in Berlin.

Considering energy parameters and operational costs

For these scenarios the demonstrator calculates energy related parameters (energy consumption & CO2 emissions) as well as investment & operational costs in a user-defined area of interest. In addition, the demonstrator visualizes the different lamp types in a 3D city model. Thus, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) together with an immersive 3D visualisation are considered for assessing the replacement of street lamps.

How it works

The web platform aims to couple the EDF‘s City Simulation Platform with the 3D Spatial-Data Infrastructure of virtualcitySYSTEMS. The latter includes the virtualcityDATABASE 3.0 with the virtualcityWFS 3.0 in order to enable web-based access to the streetlight data (CityGML). The visualization is done by the virtualcityMAP 3.0. The energy simulation is run by the City Simulation Platform. It calculates the KPIs (e.g., CO2 emissions, energy consumption and costs) for different development strategies: a business-as-usual scenario (existing gas lamps) and a selected scenario deploying one of 3 different LED lamps in the defined area of interest. In addition, the different lamp types are visualized in the 3D city model of Berlin. The first results present potential energy savings and CO2 mitigations and aim to support decision processes. It is planned to integrate more simulation scenarios in the future.

BrainBox

The demonstrator was integrated into the BrainBox of the TU Berlin and presented at the Metropolitan Solutions 2016 in Berlin. The BrainBox is an immersive Smart City Lab allowing to create scenarios and make decision collaboratively. This allows the direct cross-impact assessment of local sustainability strategies and thus to make decisions jointly based on calculated energy parameters and the visual appearance of the lamp types in the cityscape.

Access the Streetlight Energy Simulator

The Streetlight Energy Simulator is accessible here or at http://hosting.virtualcitysystems.de/demos/moabit/.

More information

For further details about LoCaL’s 3DGPC activities, please click here.

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