CITYSIM: Comprehensive Micro-Simulation of Resource Flows for Sustainable Urban Planning

TLDR

Urban planning must consider transportation of goods and people between buildings. The paper introduces CitySim, a software tool designed to support more sustainable urban settlement planning. CitySim simulates building energy, material, water, and waste flows—including their climate dependence—and is being coupled with the MATSim micro‑simulation of urban transportation. Early results show that evolutionary algorithms can optimize urban resource flows, though further work is needed.

Abstract

In this paper we describe new software “CitySim” that has been conceived to support the more sustainable planning of urban settlements. This first version focuses on simulating buildings’ energy flows, but work is also under way to model energy embodied in materials as well as the flows of water and waste and inter-relationships between these flows; likewise their dependence on the urban climate. We discuss this as well as progress that has been made to optimise urban resource flows using evolutionary algorithms. But this is only part of the picture. It is also important to take into consideration the transportation of goods and people between buildings. To this end we also discuss work that is underway to couple CitySim with a micro-simulation model of urban transportation: MATSim.