Software Helps Planners Design Walkable Citieshttps://techxplore.com/news/2019-11-software-planners-walkable-cities.htmlhttps://www.urbano.io/ Walkable cities reduce traffic congestion, which causes around 3.3 million deaths and $121 billion in economic losses every year. But when architects are developing pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, they often rely on trial and error, intuition or specialized simulations that are hard to use and to incorporate into their designs.
Urbano, a free software package launched Oct. 26 by Cornell researchers, employs data, metrics and an easy-to-use interface to help planners and architects add and assess walkability features in their designs as effectively as possible.
The tool is the product of a collaboration between the College of Architecture, Art and Planning's Environmental Systems Lab, which Dogan directs, and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the College of Engineering.
The researchers sought to create a tool that works well with the design process, which can be fast, messy and circuitous. Simulations that are difficult to perform or take too long to produce aren't practical, Dogan said.
"We worked on new algorithms that are fast," he said. "We worked on user interfaces that are intuitive. And we made sure the software can be integrated smoothly into the design process, so from the very first ideas and sketches you can get some feedback and nudge the design in the right direction."
Urbano relies on three metrics to assess walkability: Streetscore, which calculates how streets are used for certain routes; Walkscore, a customizable measurement that rates whether popular amenities are within walking distance of homes and workplaces; and AmenityScore, which considers demographics to estimate the usefulness of various services.Walkscore (Brewster et al. 2009) is a walkability rating on a scale of 0-100 based on the proximity to different amenities. Urbano allows customized weighting to compute a personalized Walkscore or to adapt the amenity demand to local and demographic preferences indicated by ADP.Urbano- A New Tool to Promote Mobility-Aware Urban Design, Active Transportation Modeling and Access Analysis for Amenities and Public Transport.
Conference: SimAUD 2018, At Delft, Netherlands
https://www.urbano.io/ ----------------------------------------
Energy Modeling Every Building in Americahttps://techxplore.com/news/2019-11-america-chattanooga.htmlThe US Department of Energy's (DOE)'s Building Technologies Office (BTO), one of eight technology offices within DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, aims to reduce the energy consumption per square foot of American buildings by 30 percent from 2010 to 2030—a massive challenge considering that America is home to 124 million building structures.Building energy modeling—computer simulation of building energy use given a description of the building, its systems, use patterns, and prevailing weather conditions—is an analytical tool that can be used to identify cost-effective energy efficiency opportunities in existing and new buildings. Today, collecting and organizing the data required to put together an energy model are largely manual processes. As a result, modeling is used in only a fraction of new construction and retrofit projects.
The ORNL approach relies on automated extraction of high-level building parameters such as floor area and orientation from publicly available data sources like satellite images and automated calibration—the use of multiple simulations to find the combination of unknown building parameters that most closely matches measured energy use. To demonstrate their approach, the team recently used the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's (OLCF's) Cray XK7 Titan supercomputer to model every building serviced by the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga—all 178,368 of them—and discovered through more than 2 million simulations that EPB could potentially save $11-$35 million per year by adjusting electricity usage during peak critical times.
"This kind of modeling is really the next level of intelligence in energy-saving policies and technologies"In the EPB project, funded by both BTO and OE, the models can be used to suggest retrofits or other solutions to save energy, thereby helping lower electricity demand during peak critical hours and better balance power grid operations. The simulations could also indicate where EPB might consider adding distributed energy resources known as microgrids—locally sited power generation such as solar, along with energy storage—to further improve grid resilience.