GIS-3D Platform to Help Decision Making for Energy Rehabilitation in Urban Environments

One of the main current challenges of European cities is to become energy self-sufficient entities. One of the vectors for this challenge is to improve the energy efficiency of the buildings and to promote the generation of renewable energies in the urban environment. The article describes a tool based on GIS-3D technologies to support the identification of the energy rehabilitation potential of neighbourhoods based on the introduction of renewable energies. The platform is based on a urban 3D model that collects the geometry of buildings, together with relevant information for the identification of rehabilitation opportunities (e.g. surfaces, heights, orientations and slopes). The project includes the generation of a cloud-based repository, which incorporates active and passive innovative solutions with metrics that allow the comparison of the solutions and the applicability of them to the real environment. The identification of rehabilitation opportunities combines information resulting from the diagnosis of the current energy performance of the district's buildings with the potential for renewable generation in the area. A multicriteria analysis process facilitates the identification of the most appropriate rehabilitation solutions for the analysed environment based on different criteria as energy, cost or applicability. The result can be visualized through a web tool that combines 2D and 3D information, with comparative information in a quantitative and geo-referenced manner. The flexibility of the architecture allows the application of the same approach to different urban challenges as the application of energy conservation measures to protected historic urban areas.