iCity 1: MUSI

Multi-Scale Urban Scenario Interface (MUSI) provides a web-based, scalable software system for energy planning. It takes into account both economic and energy analyses for renovation and energy efficiency measurement. MUSI is based on a 3D city model of individual buildings up to entire cities and addresses three of the six fields of action defined in the i_city project. It supports the main drivers and challenges of urban areas: sustainable urban development and energetic neighbourhood concepts, information platform and urban simulation system as well as financing and acceptance.

In order to further promote the energy turnaround, urban areas must also increasingly make their electricity and heat requirements more sustainable. This can be achieved, for example, through an ambitious expansion of roof-mounted solar systems, an increased building renovation quota or the expansion of combined heat and power generation and local heating networks. In many places, however, decision-makers are faced with the question of which of these approaches should be pursued in a specific urban district and with what priority. In most cases, a sufficiently detailed database is lacking that includes the contribution of all possible approaches to reducing emissions and the financial attractiveness of the measures.

The aim of MUSI is the conception and development of an innovative, web-based and regionally usable software system for strategic low-CO2 energy planning. A 3D city model is used as the data basis, which can analyse the feasibility of energy efficiency and building refurbishment measures on the one hand and the integration of renewable energies including their grid-bound distribution on the other hand and offers new simulation and visualisation possibilities. A standard web browser serves as an integration platform for the interactive evaluation of the actual situation and planning variants. Furthermore, the calculation of simulation scenarios can be executed.

The fully developed tool offers municipalities and urban planners the possibility to model the economic and ecological effects of energy concepts at the neighbourhood or city level in the level of detail relevant for these users. It offers energy suppliers the opportunity to assess the current and future energy requirements of an already supplied or potentially to be supplied neighbourhood and shows what generation potential exists in the neighbourhood, for example for solar thermal, photovoltaic or local heating, and to which economic efficiency these are subject. The advantage of this approach is the scalability of the application due to a database based on 3D city models: Thus, any project intervention can be selected, from single houses to the simulation of entire cities, without having to accept any loss of calculation accuracy.