A Building Simplification Method for UBEM Reduce computation time for simulations on residential buildings in Israel

The growing proportion of the building stock in cities and their total energy consumption in developed countries are increasing the attention on Urban Building Energy Modeling (UBEM) over the last two decades. This is due to the need of predicting the effects of changes in the national structure stock on the electricity sector. To speed up UBEM long time-consuming simulations, previous works investigated simplified building descriptions. However, they lack on generalization or did not have proper reference to compare their performance with. This paper presents a new approach to simplify models of existing residential buildings in Israel in order to reduce computation time of simulated electricity consumption with minimal drawbacks in accuracy. Five types of simplification that can be applied to any residential building were investigated and compared to detailed reference descriptions using a self-developed tool. The emphasis was put on the automation and consistency among the different types. Tests on virtual buildings, varying geometrical characteristics, and on a case study were conducted. A maximum of 4% error in yearly electricity consumption with a speed up factor up to 10 was obtained.