This paper performs, describes, and evaluates a comparison of seven software tools (ArcGIS Pro, GRASS GIS, SAGA GIS, CitySim, Ladybug, SimStadt, and UMEP) to calculate solar irradiation. The analysis focuses on data requirements, software usability, and accuracy simulation output. The use case for the comparison is solar irradiation on building surfaces, in particular on roofs. The research involves collecting and preparing spatial and weather data. Two test areas—the Santana district in São Paulo, Brazil, and the Heino rural area in Raalte, the Netherlands—were selected. In both cases, the study area encompasses the vicinity of a weather station. Therefore, the meteorological data from these stations serve as ground truth for the validation of the simulation results. We create several models (raster and vector) to meet the diverse input requirements. We present our findings and discuss the output from the software tools from both quantitative and qualitative points of view. Vector-based simulation models offer better results than raster-based ones. However, they have more complex data requirements. Future research will focus on evaluating the quality of the simulation results on vertical and tilted surfaces as well as the calculation of direct and diffuse solar irradiation values for vector-based methods.@en

Optimizing the built environment via simulations of building models hinges on standardizing data acquisition. In this research, we put forward distinct levels of detail for geometry and material inputs, specifically tailored for indoor daylight applications. We primarily focus on understanding the uncertainties arising from imprecise estimations of material optical properties and incomplete geometrical inputs in climate-based indoor daylight simulations. Employing a Monte Carlo approach, we analyzed six office and teaching spaces, creating 20 variations for each by altering geometrical completeness and material accuracy. The technique of excluding non-permanent objects below certain sizes in four graduated steps was used to derive and test the impact of various geometrical levels of detail. Our findings reveal that different levels of geometrical completeness lead to errors ranging from 1.08% to 18.05%. Additionally, a twofold increase in simulation time was noted when geometrical detail was enhanced relative to the most basic model. Errors stemming from imprecise definitions of material optical properties showed a normal distribution. The uncertainty in simulation outcomes showed a linear rise with increasing input material uncertainty, lying between 10% to 30%, depending on space configurations. We observed heightened uncertainty near openings, attributed to window transmittance effects. The research underscores that daylight predictions are markedly more sensitive to transmittance uncertainties than to those in reflectance, regardless of the window-to-floor ratio. These insights may help to guide a more efficient data acquisition process of indoor spaces for daylight simulations.

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Solar energy is becoming increasingly important with the transition towards green and sustainable energy. Predicting solar irradiance is one of the core steps to optimise solar energy utilisation when planning and scheduling power grids. Accurate solar irradiance prediction can also help forecast microclimate conditions, enabling the analysis of citizens and planning of optimal intervention strategies for heating or cooling behaviour. This paper discusses a novel approach to computing the solar potential of buildings at the city level with promising scalability using semantic 3D city models. Experiments are conducted at different locations in the Netherlands. We evaluate our results by comparing them to the statistical Dutch data, and CitySim shows huge discrepancies in summer.@en

De groeiende adoptie van BIM-modellen maakt het digitaal checken van bouwvergunningen mogelijk. Door ingediende BIM-modellen automatisch te checken, kunnen huidige op pdf-gebaseerde vergunningsprocessen efciënter, maar ook nauwkeuriger en transparanter worden. Bovendien kunnen ontwerpers – als de checktools vrij beschikbaar zijn – zelf al de vergunningscontroles uitvoeren die de gemeente doet na de indiening. Zo kunnen de vergunningsvoorwaarden al in de ontwerpfase worden meegenomen. Nu zijn er vaak meerdere indieningen nodig, voordat een vergunning wordt goedgekeurd. Individuele gemeenten experimenteren al met digitale vergunningverlening. Om digitale vergunningverlening generiek toepasbaar te maken, wordt momenteel het CHEK project (Change toolkit for Digital Building Permit Processing) uitgevoerd.@en

With the growing demand for sustainable accountability, the European Directive 2014/24/EU (EU 2014) pushes architects to deliver Building Information Models (BIM) as a part of procurement processes for public buildings. In the Netherlands, BIM model data is relevant to the building permitting process, which involves an environmental performance calculation (MPG). This assessment takes into consideration the embodied carbon of materials in a building. Although this analysis is performed by a qualified expert in late design phases, architects benefit from integrating carbon data in early design decision-making. Design methods supported by Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) values are needed before involving expert collaborators, and not only when applying for a building permit. The existing carbon assessment tools require detailed data from BIM models, which are often not available at early design phases. Simplified tools have been discussed in theory, and explored in their potential applications, however, there lacks scientific literature discussing the hurdles designers face in their attempt to create such tools in practice, for their internal use throughout early design phases. This paper focuses on the architecture professional practice and design methods supported by digital and computational technologies, regarding embodied carbon data. It investigates the challenges in integrating embodied carbon data in the design workflow, through the development of a digital tool made by designers, for designers. This paper conducts an empirical investigation within a Rotterdam-based architecture office, with a broad portfolio in BIM usage and public building projects, to identify and categorize the factors affecting carbon data integration into the design workflows. It proposes a taxonomy of challenges within the architecture office, to better communicate the designer's needs to the data providers and software developers with architects as a target user. Amongst the bottlenecks encountered are: access to data (data inclusiveness), data literacy and connecting data usage with design decision-making.@en

The role and adoption of 3D city models have been changing from a data endpoint to a centralised data source that is used for a variety of different analyses in different sectors. This change has not yet been fully completed and the transition process is still very noticeable at certain places. For example, data required for city-scale analyses are often missing, incorrect, or not stored in a standard way. A subset of these data (E.g. shell volume, shell area & footprint area) can be approximated from lower LoD shapes (LoD2.2 or lower) in the 3D city models. However, these models frequently simplify reality and therefore these approximations are not accurate. This paper proposes computing these data by voxelising Building Information Modelling (BIM) models representing the same buildings as the 3D city model. It is shown that a subset of these approximations (shell volume & footprint area) are more accurate than values computed from lower LoD shapes. Storing these data as attributes of the building models in 3D city models can improve the ease of use and the outcome of city-scale analyses. The computed values from BIM models can also be assigned to outputs of BIM to Geo conversions. This overturns the accuracy loss of the geometry caused by the conversion in which geometry is significantly generalised and simplified.@en

Delivering value from digital concepts such as Digital Twins is necessary to address systemic national and global issues, such as achieving Net Zero. However, there is still a lack of consensus over what a Digital Twin (DT) is and efforts to clarify this do not consider the Geospatial perspective. With the aspiration for national- and international-scale DTs, it is important that the Geospatial community understands its role in supporting the realisation of the value of these DTs. Here, a systematic literature review is used to gather DT case studies that use, or are inferred to use, elements of the Geospatial discipline. A total of 77 DT case studies about smart cities, manufacturing, energy, construction and agriculture are reviewed in full, and 24 Geospatial DT dimensions are defined and then compared with existing DT dimensions. The results indicate a considerable use of Geospatial Science in DTs that is not explicitly stated, meaning that there are possibly missed opportunities for collaboration between the Geospatial and DT communities. We conclude that the role of Geospatial Science in DTs is larger than stated and needs to be understood further.@en

Digital Twins are realistic digital representations of the physical world, frequently characterised by a two way link between digital and physical. Originating in manufacturing, they are now expanding to city and national scales. In this paper we explore connections between Geographic Information Science and National Digital Twins. Six different viewpoints and perspectives are presented on the topic, highlighting the importance of: geospatial data engineering; metadata engineering; standards; challenges facing mapping agencies; governance and public values; and a ”reality check” that explores the gaps between what is required and what can currently be achieved. We present 22 recommendations and summarise the findings by presenting a high level research agenda to enable better understanding and articulation of the link between the two.@en

The integration of 3D city models and Building Information Models (BIM) in the context of GeoBIM has gained significant attention from both academia and industry. Harmonizing the distinct characteristics and goals of these models is crucial for successful integration. In this paper, we present the development of a plugin for Autodesk Revit, a popular BIM platform, which allows for the incorporation of 3D Geo-data encoded in CityJSON. The plugin, published as open source, enables the generation of individual geometries with associated city model attributes as parameters, facilitating analysing the impact of new or changed buildings (modelled in BIM) on the environment (captured in geo-data). Challenges addressed during development include georeferencing, data format import, handling different geometry approaches, hierarchy of attributes, code optimization, user-friendliness, and enhanced visualization. The plugin contributes to the seamless integration of geo- and BIM data, enhancing interoperability and supporting informed decision-making in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction and urban domains.@en

3D modeling of indoor spaces is a prerequisite for daylight simulation, and the accuracy of the 3D models has a significant impact on the simulation. The goal of this study was to quantify the errors caused by modeling indoor spaces at different accuracy levels to find the optimal balance between the reliability of the results and labor investment. For this purpose, we introduce a level of detail (LOD) concept for indoor spaces based on the size of non-permanent indoor objects by inclusion and exclusion from the simulation scene. The errors corresponding to models with low accuracies are measured by climate-based simulation using an improved two-phase method. Our results show that inaccurate modeling of indoor spaces causes between 10-70% error in TAI with 25% median across all spaces.@en

Historic gardens, regarded as a significant genre of cultural heritage, encapsulate the enduring essence of bygone eras while concurrently transcending temporal boundaries to resonate with the present and future. These gardens provide us vitality and inspiration, holding a collective repository of human memory and serving as a testament to our shared heritage. However, like landscapes, gardens constantly change through natural processes and human interventions. How can we preserve these gardens, though changes are unavoidable? Spatial and visual characteristics are the gardens' essential characteristics, and point-cloud (LiDAR) technologies are powerful tools to reveal and analyze gardens’ spatial-visual relationships and characteristics. Therefore, this paper aims to present a point-cloud-based approach to identifying spatial-visual design principles and making them operational to protect and develop historic gardens. Additionally, several methods have been proposed in this research, including (a) a voxel-based method to transfer points into a solid model for GIS-based computation, (b) a novel method to analyze the field of view (FOV), and (c) a systemic framework to reveal historic gardens’ spatial-visual characteristics based on the voxelized model. Jichang Garden, a historic garden in Wuxi, China, known for its visual design and spatial arrangement, has been selected as a case study to showcase how to apply the methods proposed by this paper. The findings include the design principles for the water body, the arrangement for a route, and the planting strategies of the garden. The conservational strategies have been formed based on the findings, and the appliable potentials and limitations of the methods have also been discussed.@en

Accurate lane maps with semantics are crucial for various applications, such as high-definition maps (HD Maps), intelligent transportation systems (ITS), and digital twins. Manual annotation of lanes is labor-intensive and costly, prompting researchers to explore automatic lane extraction methods. This paper presents an end-to-end large-scale lane mapping method that considers both lane geometry and semantics. This study represents lane markings as polylines with uniformly sampled points and associated semantics, allowing for adaptation to varying lane shapes. Additionally, we propose an end-to-end network to extract lane polylines from mobile laser scanning (MLS) data, enabling the inference of vectorized lane instances without complex post-processing. The network consists of three components: a feature encoder, a column proposal generator, and a lane information decoder. The feature encoder encodes textual and structural information of lane markings to enhance the method’s robustness to data imperfections, such as varying lane intensity, uneven point density, and occlusion-induced incomplete data. The column proposal generator generates regions of interest for the subsequent decoder. Leveraging the embedded multi-scale features from the feature encoder, the lane decoder effectively predicts lane polylines and their associated semantics without requiring step-by-step conditional inference. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three lane datasets have demonstrated the performance of the proposed method, even in the presence of incomplete data and complex lane topology. Furthermore, the datasets used in this work, including source ground points, generated bird’s eye view (BEV) images, and annotations, will be publicly available with the publication of the paper.@en

With the growing demand for sustainable accountability, the European Directive 2014/24/EU (EU 2014) pushes architects to deliver Building Information Models (BIM) as a part of procurement processes for public buildings. In the Netherlands, BIM model data is relevant to the building permitting process, which involves an environmental performance calculation (MPG). This assessment takes into consideration the embodied carbon of materials in a building. Although this analysis is performed by a qualified expert in late design phases, architects benefit from integrating carbon data in early design decision-making. Design methods supported by Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) values are needed before involving expert collaborators, and not only when applying for a building permit. The existing carbon assessment tools require detailed data from BIM models, which are often not available at early design phases. Simplified tools have been discussed in theory, and explored in their potential applications, however, there lacks scientific literature discussing the hurdles designers face in their attempt to create such tools in practice, for their internal use throughout early design phases. This paper focuses on the architecture professional practice and design methods supported by digital and computational technologies, regarding embodied carbon data. It investigates the challenges in integrating embodied carbon data in the design workflow, through the development of a digital tool made by designers, for designers. This paper conducts an empirical investigation within a Rotterdam-based architecture office, with a broad portfolio in BIM usage and public building projects, to identify and categorize the factors affecting carbon data integration into the design workflow. It proposes a taxonomy of challenges within the architecture office, to better communicate the designer’s needs to the data providers and software developers with architects as a target user. Amongst the bottlenecks encountered are: access to data inclusiveness), data literacy and connecting data usage with design decision-making.@en

The integration of geoinformation with Building Information Models (BIM), termed GeoBIM, has garnered significant attention across academic and non-academic sectors due to its potential for analyzing the reciprocal impacts of new designs on their environment. However, achieving integration between 3D city models and BIM necessitates ensuring consistency and alignment between their respective features and specifications. Georeferencing, a fundamental task in GeoBIM, involves establishing a connection between digital models and the Earth’s surface through coordinate transformations. Despite its importance, accurate georeferencing of BIM models has often been overlooked, resulting in challenges for integrating BIM models and geographical data. To address this gap, our study proposes a novel approach to enhance the georeferencing accuracy of BIM models by integrating surveyed points, considering the varying levels of georeferencing precision applicable to Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) models. We explore the potential benefits and challenges associated with this integrated surveyed point methodology, providing insights to improve georeferencing within the GeoBIM framework.@en

Urban building energy modelling aims at studying different approaches to estimate the energy consumed by buildings. However, most urban building energy models introduced in the literature ignore the impact that buildings have on their outdoor conditions, and inversely. Therefore, the paper determines whether interactions between buildings and outdoor conditions affects simulations performed using an urban building energy model, in particular during their calibration. Results suggest that interactions between buildings and their outdoor conditions affect the sensitivity of outcomes provided by an urban building energy model towards uncertain parameters and the probability to calibrate the model in accordance to some standards.@en

In the evolving landscape of digitalization, automating building permit processes are crucial for municipalities and other governmental bodies. Our research addresses the complexities of modeling digital building permit regulations, considering the level of the information needs (LoIN) for geometry-based regulations in four municipalities (Prague, Lisbon, Vila Nova de Gaia, and Ascoli Piceno) as case study. We propose a methodology and guidelines for geometrical building modeling, addressing challenges of integrating geoinformation with Building Information Modeling (BIM) for environmental based digital building permit (DBP) checks. This paper provides BIM-IFC geometrical interpretation choices, ensuring a seamless conversion into 3D city models. It offers insights for software companies, developers, and standardization organizations towards in implementing DBP checks, and preliminary results for a future scalable approach.@en

This paper discusses the reconstruction of LoD2 building models from 2D and 3D data for large-scale urban environments. Traditional methods involve the use of LiDAR point clouds, but due to high costs and long intervals associated with acquiring such data for rapidly developing areas, researchers have started exploring the use of point clouds generated from (oblique) aerial images. However, using such point clouds for traditional plane detection-based methods can result in significant errors and introduce noise into the reconstructed building models. To address this, this paper presents a method for extracting rooflines from true orthophotos using line detection for the reconstruction of building models at the LoD2 level. The approach is able to extract relatively complete rooflines without the need for pre-labeled training data or pre-trained models. These lines can directly be used in the LoD2 building model reconstruction process. The method is superior to existing plane detection-based methods and state-of-the-art deep learning methods in terms of the accuracy and completeness of the reconstructed building. Our source code is available at https://github.com/tudelft3d/Roofline-extraction-from-orthophotos.@en

Although level of detail (LoD) is a central concept in 3D city modelling, specifying different LoDs in an unambiguous manner is not straightforward. To resolve this, a set of frameworks have been developed. This paper evaluates the suitability of the LoD framework of (Biljecki et al. 2016) for 3D building models that have been generated directly from BIM models. The output of two BIM shell extractors are tested on how well they can be defined by the framework. It was found that although BIM-derived models can be specified by the framework to a certain degree, the framework is not fully capable to also specify lower quality models and to support all the output that may come from BIM shell extractors. This can be resolved by either addressing issues in the shell extractors’ output or in the framework itself. The results of this research can be used to improve the LoD framework and to adjust the shell extractors output to better comply with unambiguous definitions of building models at different LoDs and could be a first step to standardise the conversion of BIM models at different LoDs to be used in urban applications.@en

This paper describes a data driven urban canopy model that can be coupled with detailed building energy models. The data driven model is used to assess the outdoor air temperature and humidity in a street canyon considering as inputs weather conditions at the atmospheric layer, the surface temperature of surrounding building facades and the street, and the heat released from the use of air-conditioning. Predictions made by the model were tested using measurements of the outdoor air temperature and humidity collected between April and August 2019 in Singapore. Results show that the model estimates the outdoor air temperature with a similar accuracy than others that were validated using the same input and test data, while providing estimates with a higher temporal resolution and considering urban morphology with a higher fidelity. They also demonstrate that the model can predict the impact of waste heat releases and cool pavement on the outdoor air temperature and building energy consumption. In the future, vegetation could be considered as an input of the model if the land surface temperature is measured using an infrared thermal camera. Another improvement would be to define weather conditions at the atmospheric layer from rooftop measurements or a climate model.@en

With the rapid advancement of 3D sensing technologies, obtaining 3D shape information of objects has become increasingly convenient. Lidar technology, with its capability to accurately capture the 3D information of objects at long distances, has been widely applied in the collection of 3D data in urban scenes. However, the collected point cloud data often exhibit incompleteness due to factors such as occlusion, signal absorption, and specular reflection. This paper explores the application of point cloud completion technologies in processing these incomplete data and establishes a new real-world benchmark Building-PCC dataset, to evaluate the performance of existing deep learning methods in the task of urban building point cloud completion. Through a comprehensive evaluation of different methods, we analyze the key challenges faced in building point cloud completion, aiming to promote innovation in the field of 3D geoinformation applications. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ tudelft3d/Building-PCC-Building-Point-Cloud-Completion-Benchmarks.git@en