Ursula Eicker

Concordia University Montreal · Buildings Civil and Environmental Engineering

Energy disaggregation, or Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM), involves different methods aiming to distinguish the individual contribution of appliances, given the aggregated power signal. In this paper, the application of finite Generalized Gaussian and finite Gamma mixtures in energy disaggregation is proposed and investigated. The procedure in...

This paper presents a concept and first glimpse at the development of an urban digital twin framework to estimate and forecast the carbon footprints of urban neighbourhoods, with a focus on household consumption choices, specifically in buildings, food, and transportation sectors, as key emission contributors. Despite constituting nearly three-quar...

The transition of the transport sector to e-mobility poses various challenges but also provides great flexible load and supply potential and thus enables a stronger coupling of the transport sector with other sectors. If emerging opportunities such as bidirectional charging in the context of Vehicle-to-Home and Vehicle-to-Grid applications are util...

Forecasting floods encompasses significant complexity due to the nonlinear nature of hydrological systems, which involve intricate interactions among precipitation, landscapes, river systems, and hydrological networks. Recent efforts in hydrology have aimed at predicting water flow, floods, and quality, yet most methodologies overlook the influence...

The transition of the transport sector to e-mobility poses various challenges, but also provides great flexible load and supply potential and thus enables a stronger coupling of the transport sector with other sectors. If emerging opportunities such as bidirectional charging in the context of Vehicle-to-Home and Vehicle-to-Grid applications are uti...

In the face of rapidly evolving energy landscapes, driven by increasing integration of renewable energy and the transition towards a more sustainable grid, the role of demand response (DR) programs in maintaining grid stability and efficiency has become increasingly critical. This study presents an in-depth methodology for assessing the nexus betwe...

Buildings consist of systems that have to interact and coordinate with various systems to function smoothly. It is essential to have models and representations of buildings in forms that are easy to read for effective simulation, control, and optimization of building systems. It is also necessary for integrating and creating novel applications and...

Occupant-related parameters significantly impact the urban building energy simulation uncertainty. In most existing urban-scale building energy models, fixed default occupant-related schedules are typically used, which might not necessarily capture the variation associated with occupancy. Without a more complex occupancy model within urban building...

Many key studies in recent times have proposed integration of renewable energy and transition to 100% renewable energy as a solution to tackling climate change. However, there is little consensus and a wide range of assumptions made across the various studies. This study attempts to draw the most reliable set of parameters identified and numbers av...

In Germany, renewable energy sources play a crucial role in electricity generation, with wind and photovoltaic (PV) leading the way. In 2022, large wind turbines contributed 24.1% of the electricity generated, while PV accounted for 10.6%. Contrary, small wind power holds a marginal share of less than 0.01%. This is unfortunate as the decentralized...

This paper presents an investigation into the interoperability of 3D building energy data management, delivery, processing, and visualization via web clients using Open Geospatial Consortium – Application Programming Interface (OGC API) standard-based data models and web interfaces. Specifically, the OGC API – 3D GeoVolumes enable access to 3D city...

During the first years of the last decade, Egypt used to face recurrent electricity cut-offs in summer. In the past few years, the electricity tariff dramatically increased. Radiative cooling to the clear night sky is a renewable energy source that represents a relative solution. The dry desert climate promotes nocturnal radiative cooling applicati...

Due to computational barriers of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models, they cannot be used for tasks such as (near) real-time simulations. Reduced-order model (ROM) can be used as an alternative to CFD since it can approximate the results in a fraction of the CFD simulation time. The present article generates a data-driven ROM, using convoluti...

Landfills are extensively applied to dispose of municipal solid wastes in developed and developing countries. Landfill gas generation from biodegradable organic wastes can be collected and converted to energy. When the gas collection system is shutdown, some of this gas can accumulate and be stored inside the landfill. Using the gas storage capacit...

The design, operational planning, and integration of wind power plants with other renewables and the grid face challenges attributed to the intermittent nature of wind power generation. Addressing this issue necessitates the development of a smart wind power (and in particular wind speed) forecasting approach. This is a complex task due to substant...

Decarbonizing buildings is crucial in addressing pressing climate change issues. Buildings significantly contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing their carbon footprint is essential to achieving sustainable and low-carbon cities. Retrofitting buildings to become more energy efficient constitutes a solution. However, building ener...

Globally, there is accelerating interest in cities and the analysis of their underlying systems to understand, project, and propose sustainable energy transformations. These urban areas represent a complex combination of heterogeneous data, which complicates the process of engineering modeling and predicting changes that could occur. Identifying th...

The evolution of cities to smart cities has demonstrated that the citizens’ quality of life is increased. Moreover, city planning follows an organized structure covering the citizens’ needs. This structure leads to generating smart communities. As a result, megacities based on smart communities can be developed. Communication systems that send and...

This chapter deals with the fundamental components that are used to build a smart house and building. This chapter also shows how smart homes and buildings are sensed and controlled. An intelligent house also has to improve the quality of life of seniors and handicapped people, so this chapter presents some strategies to achieve that goal.

The concept of Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) has emerged as a promising approach to achieving sustainable urban development. PEDs aim to balance the energy demand and supply within a district while reducing the carbon footprint and promoting renewable energy sources. Urban–Industrial Symbiosis (UIS) is another approach that involves the exchange...

This paper presents the first part of a research-work conducted at the University of Applied Sciences (HFT-Stuttgart). The aim of the research was to investigate the potential of low-cost renewable energy systems to reduce the energy demand of the building sector in hot and dry areas. Radiative cooling to the night sky represents a low-cost renewab...

During the last few years, interest has been growing in modelling the building stock to provide a possibility to transform, adapt and decarbonize cities. To scale the modelling of buildings on an urban scale, large quantities of detailed data are needed, which are not commonly accessible. Therefore, simplification processes for modelling the buildi...

Landfills will likely remain an essential part of integrated solid waste management systems in many developed and developing countries for the foreseeable future. Further improvements are required to model the generated gas from landfills. The literature has not addressed detailed waste characterization in landfill gas (LFG) modeling by a first-ord...

Landfills will likely remain an essential part of integrated solid waste management systems in many developed and developing countries for the foreseeable future. This paper uses a genetic algorithm to fit parameters to a CH4 and H2S generation model independently based on a modified first-order decay model. In the case of CH4 generation modeling,...

Global warming is already significantly impacting communities, their health and infrastructure. Previous studies showed that climate change is making the earth warmer, which consequently affects the heating and cooling loads of buildings and their thermal performance. Therefore, it is beneficial to analyze how buildings respond to climate change in...

Within smart grids, end-users often seek to reduce electricity costs using a home energy management system, while the power utility aims to optimize the grid operation. This article proposes a novel three-level framework to tackle the contradictory nature of the objectives of end-user and distribution system operators (DSOs) by upward and downward...

Transit agencies are increasingly embracing electric buses (EB) as an energy-efficient and emission-free alternative to the conventional bus fleets. They are rapidly replacing conventional buses with electric ones. As a result, emerging challenges of electrifying public transportation bus networks in cities should be addressed. Introducing electric...

Microgrids (MGs) can be used as a solution to ensure resilience against power supply failures in electricity grids caused by extreme weather conditions, unavailability of generation capacities, and problems with transmission components. The literature is rich in research focusing on strengthening the planning of microgrids based on overall load dem...

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been considered as a promising numerical approach in fluid dynamics problems, such as urban airflow prediction. However, airflow field prediction using CFD models is time-consuming. Thus, they cannot be used for (near) real-time and long-term simulations. Reduced-order models (ROMs) are emerged to obviate this...

Transit-oriented development (TOD) is characterized as compact, mixed-use, and pedestrian-friendly development around transit stations, aiming to balance land use and transportation, enhance sustainability, and improve public transport accessibility. There are various TOD assessment methods; each target one of these goals. This paper proposes a com...

One of the main required actions for moving forward in zero-carbon cities’ mission is to increase building energy efficiency. Building energy simulations are key tools for HVAC control, building energy management, testing different building energy efficiency scenarios, and providing feedback to the occupants. Unfortunately, these tools have a signi...

Due to computational barriers of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models, they cannot be used for tasks such as (near) real-time simulations. Reduced-order model (ROM) can be used as an alternative to CFD since it can approximate the results in a fraction of the CFD simulation time. The present article generates a data-driven ROM, using convoluti...

The simulation of residential electricity load profiles (ELPs) has always played an important role for designing and evaluating energy systems for buildings or entire neighborhoods. Large-scale measurement data, the counterpart to these synthetic data, are often not available or only available at great expense in terms of time and under considerati...

The global demand for resources such as energy, land, or water is constantly increasing. It is therefore not surprising that research on the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus has become a scientific as well as a general focus in recent years. A significant increase in publications since 2015 can be observed, and it can be expected that this trend will...

This paper proposes a novel methodology to enrich the available Canadian residential archetypes with stochastic household profiles derived from statistical databases. The Canadian time use survey (TUS) data is used for developing a stochastic activity-based model to generate energy demand profiles of different households' compositions. The proposed...

Radiant floor systems offer significant potential for studying and developing energy flexibility strategies for buildings and their interaction with smart grids. Efficient design and operation of such systems require several critical decisions on design and control variables to maintain comfortable thermal conditions in the space and floor surface...

Urban Green Spaces (UGS) offer various environmental benefits, including controlling the Air Quality Index (AQI), regulating outdoor thermal comfort, and providing suitable spaces for enhanced human health. Due to the high concentrations of pollutants in cities, especially particulate matters with a 2.5-micrometer diameter (PM2.5), various countrie...

In mounted photovoltaic (PV) facilities, energy output losses due to inter-row shading are unavoidable. In order to limit the shadow cast by one module row on another, sufficient inter-row space must be planned. However, it is not uncommon to see PV plants with such close row spacing that energy losses occur owing to row-to-row shading effects. Low...

In this paper, we present an approach on automatic energy system modeling and simulation. We develop two different methods to dimension the components of energy systems: one approach is an easy-to-use and to-adapt rule-based method, where the size of components is based e.g. on the heat demand of the buildings. The second approach is to dimension c...

Nowadays, traditional power systems are being developed as an emergence for the use of smart grids that cover the integration of multi-renewable energy sources with power electronics converters. Efforts were made to design power quality controllers for multi-renewable energy systems (photovoltaic (PV), Fuel Cell and Battery) to meet huge energy dem...

In the coming years, major transportation sectors will be electrified, in which more accessible and easy solutions for charging Electric Vehicles (EVs) become vital. Wireless charging is considered one of the best and easiest methods to charge EVs anywhere, even during the driving of cars. To get accurate charging power rates while charging wireles...

The current study presents methods to design heat pump energy systems using an automated workflow of building energy simulation and energy system parametrisation. The methods are applied to a case study of a mixed used complex located in Montreal, where the effects of using groundwater and surface water as heat sources for the heat pump system will...

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models have been used for the simulation of urban airflow and pollutant dispersion, due to their capability to capture different length scales and turbulence nature of the flow field. However, their high computational costs prevent them from being used for (near) real-time simulations, long-term predictions, and s...

Addressing the gap between available urban building data, energy performance evaluation, and spatial distribution of end-users is a growing concern of municipalities to support urban energy planning and retrofitting towards low carbon emission strategies. These days, many existing urban building energy models (UBEM) use the non-geo-specified 3D bui...

Construction material technologies are the driving force for enhancing and improving building and infrastructure functionality. Solutions for many challenges faced by the construction industry, such as low energy efficiency and high carbon emission, had sparkled from innovative construction materials technologies. Hence, selecting adequate construc...

Urban Green Spaces (UGS) offer various environmental benefits, including controlling the Air Quality Index (AQI) and providing suitable spaces for enhancing human health. This paper aims to provide models for designing canyons to reach clean and sustainable cities. These scenarios contain a pattern of greenery located on the streets. An attempt has...

Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) are one of the concepts developed to reduce the impact of cities and districts on overall carbon emissions. Given the innovation brought by this concept, the implementation of PEDs comes with a series of challenges. These range from the high use of renewable energy sources, through the need of a positive balance at...

Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) have the potential of accelerating the decarbonization of urban areas and promoting scalability between cities. The development and real-world implementation of such innovative concepts can be enhanced through urban energy modelling. However, assessing PEDs can be challenging, and information on this topic is scarce...

Energy storage systems are an inevitable technology in our day-to-day life at different capacities ranging from small scale capacitors and mobile batteries to a larger scale district heating network connecting multiple energy centers in a city. Especially as the renewables becoming the preferred energy source in many nations for several reasons, en...

Occupant-related inputs are significant parameters that influence energy simulation accuracy at both the building and urban levels. In most previous research works, fixed occupant schedules were used in urban-scale building energy modeling. The main reason is the lack of data availability to model the dynamic occupancy schedules. In recent years, u...

There is growing interest in energy mapping amongst municipal planners and policymakers to accelerate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction program implementation. Responding to this interest partly involves addressing challenges related to building stock data collection and processing. The present study, carried out in conjunction with Natural...

Cities play an essential role in energy consumption and its environmental impacts. Urban Building Energy Modeling (UBEM) can help optimize the built environment's energy efficiency and improve the design and operation of building energy systems. In order to develop UBEM, individual buildings' characteristics such as constructions, internal loads, e...

High penetration levels of Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) could cause stress on the network and might violate the limits and constraints under extreme conditions, such as exceeding power and voltage limits on transformers and power lines. This paper defines extreme conditions as the state of a load or network that breaks the limits of the constra...

Optimal load dispatching plays a vital role in improving the reliability and efficiency of renewable energy systems. This research presents a Mixed‐Integer Linear Programming (MILP) approach for optimizing a power system's daily operational cost while increasing its resilience, including a wind turbine, battery, and conventional grid. Deep learning...

Occupants' thermostat setpoint preferences play a vital role in HVAC systems' operation and significantly influence the building energy performance. However, despite the diversity in indoor temperature preferences, most building energy codes assume identical thermostat setpoints for buildings of the same type. To this end, this study aims to demons...

To date, the assessment of the energy flexibility to be delivered by existing buildings and by their legacy HVAC systems is hindered by a lack of commonly agreed-upon methodologies. There are many research works in the field; however, many of them are focused on the design stage or, in case of addressing building operation, they are based on contro...

This paper proposes an original multi-criteria decision-making optimization algorithm to select the best solar panels in an existing market and optimally size the photovoltaic (PV) system for an electric vehicle parking lot (EVPL). Our proposed algorithm is called rank-weigh-rank (RWR), and it is compared to the well-known technique for order of pr...

The paper explains a workflow to simulate the food energy water (FEW) nexus for an urban district combining various data sources like 3D city models, particularly the City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) data model from the Open Geospatial Consortium, Open StreetMap and Census data. A long term vision is to extend the CityGML data model by deve...

The transition of the transportation sector from internal combustion engine vehicles to battery electric vehicles (EVs) will heavily increase the energy demand on the network, causing severe techno-economic problems. To solve these issues, advanced charging strategies were proposed to reduce the EVs’ charging impact on the network. The problem aris...

Time-resolved, occupancy-dependent electricity load profiles at building level for city quarters or entire cities are important for planning authorities, project developers, utilities or other stakeholders in order to develop energy saving strategies and meet climate targets. Firstly, this information enables a more accurate modelling of renewable...

The importance of climate protection and sustainability is steadily increasing all over the world. However, there is a large potential for reducing emissions in the heating demand reduction and renewable heat supply of buildings that needs to be addressed. Therefore, a method was developed within the scope of this work that allows local decision-ma...

Home Energy Management Systems (HEMSs) may not be able to solve network issues, especially in the presence of high penetration level of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and decentral renewable energy. To solve the problem, Grid Energy Management Systems (GEMSs) were introduced. However, because of the contradictory nature of the main objectives of HEMS whic...

Eine nachhaltige Wärmeversorgung von Bestands- und Neubauquartieren kann maßgeblich dazu beitragen, die klimapolitischen Zielsetzungen Deutschlands und der EU zu erreichen. Der 3D-Gebäudeenergie-Workflow-Manager SimStadt hilft dabei, die energetische Quartiersplanung zu vereinfachen.

The growing urban population globally leads to higher greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and stress on the electricity networks for meeting the increasing demand. In the early urban design stages, the optimization of the urban morphology and building physics characteristics can reduce energy demand. Local generation using renewable energy resources is...

At a global level, the need for energy efficiency and an increased share of renewable energy sources is evident, as is the crucial role of cities due to the rapid urbanization rate. As a consequence of this, the research work related to Positive Energy Districts (PED) has accelerated in recent years. A common shared definition, as well as technolog...

Designing district-scale energy systems with renewable energy sources is still a challenge, as it involves modeling of multiple loads and many options to combine energy system components. In the current study, two different energy system scenarios for a district in Montreal/Canada are compared to choose the most cost-effective and energy-efficient...

Nowadays, there are several thousand solar panels (SP) in the market. These panels vary in size, efficiency, cost, warranty, technology, etc. Selecting the best SP becomes complicated when other factors are added to the list, such as the available roof area, weather conditions, electricity tariffs, energy consumptions, etc. Therefore, it becomes cr...

The increased integration of Electric Vehicles (EVs) into the distribution network can create severe issues—especially when demand response programs and time-varying electricity prices are applied, EVs tend to charge during the off-peak time to minimize the electricity cost. Hence, another peak demand might be created, and other solutions are requi...

An integrated urban platform is the essential software infrastructure for smart, sustainable and resilient city planning, operation and maintenance. Today such platforms are mostly designed to handle and analyze large and heterogeneous urban data sets from very different domains. Energy modeling and optimization functionalities are usually not part...

Building stocks account for a large share of energy consumption and harbour great potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The field of urban building energy modelling (UBEM) offers a range of approaches to inform climate protection policies, producing output of different granularity and quality. We compare two typology-based (archetype) ap...

The aim of the present paper is to develop a reliable and accurate model of the wastewater biochemical treatment process and to explore the behaviour through a general dynamic simulation environment, namely the INtegrated Simulation Environment Language (INSEL), for the analysis of the energy demand of the whole wastewater treatment plant. In parti...

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the influence of electricity tariffs on energy flexibility in buildings and associated energy costs. A residential building located in Stuttgart, Germany, equipped with a hybrid heat pump which is coupled with a thermal energy storage unit and a gas boiler is used as a case study. A model predictive co...

An integrated urban platform is the essential software infrastructure for smart, sustainable and resilitent city planning, operation and maintenance. Today such platforms are mostly designed to handle and analyze large and heterogeneous urban data sets from very different domains. Modeling and optimization functionalities are usually not part of th...

Reducing CO2 emissions by improving energy efficiency and integrating renewables while offering a high quality of living and working in neighborhoods and campuses, is the declared aim of the threeGermancase studies described in this paper. The focus is to assess and analyze the different phases of an energetic retrofitting: planning, construction a...