Workflow automation for combined modeling of buildings and district energy systems

In many urban contexts, energy systems are undergoing fundamental change towards more interconnected system layouts. Appropriate planning tools are necessary to guide this transition towards more energy efficient system designs. Thus, the aim of this paper is to present workflow automation approaches to model buildings and district energy systems for dynamic simulation and integral system analyses. For data collection and management, we use a Geographic Information System coupled with a PostgreSQL database. In this paper, we present the software tools TEASER and uesmodels which use this data to automatically generate dynamic building and district energy system models in the modeling language Modelica. To demonstrate the application of these tools for workflow automation, we analyze a university campus with 39 buildings. In one scenario, an optimization led to an improved heating curve, with which yearly primary energy demand in the model was reduced by 0.9%. In a second scenario, the retrofitting of all building envelopes in the district energy system reduced primary energy demand by 16.0%. These examples showed that the presented approach is suited to evaluate options for improving district energy system, ranging from improved operation to changes in system design, and a combination of both. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.