Fennell, Pamela;
Ruyssevelt, Paul;
Korolija, Ivan;
(2020)
Balancing accuracy and computation burden - an evaluation of different sensitivity analysis methods for urban scale building energy models.
In:
Proceedings of the second IBPSA-Scotland Conference uSIM2020 Urban Energy Simulation.
IBPSA: Edinburgh, UK.
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Abstract
Urban-scale building energy models capitalise on the increasing accessibility of large-scale urban data sets and allow the rapid evaluation of competing policy options, making them a vital tool for urban responses to the climate emergency. However, the vast number of different inputs required to model a complex urban environment makes it impossible to precisely quantify all inputs and the complex energy flows within models must be simplified to achieve tractable solutions, as a result, the outputs of these models inevitably have a significant range of variation. Without understanding these limits of inference resulting policy advice is inherently defective. Uncertainty Analysis (UA) and Sensitivity Analysis (SA) offer essential tools to determine the limits of inference of a model and explore the factors which have the most effect on the model outputs. Despite a wellestablished body of work applying UA and SA to models of individual buildings, very limited work has been done to apply these tools to urban scale models. This study presents a systematic comparison of three different sensitivity analysis methods for a high resolution, dynamic thermal simulation at the neighbourhood scale. Accuracy, processing time and complexity of application of each method is evaluated to provide guidance which can inform the application of these methods to other urban and large-scale building energy models. The results highlight the importance of considering both model form and input parameter scale when selecting an appropriate method. In this case, the elementary effects method (EER) offers good performance at relatively low simulation cost.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | Balancing accuracy and computation burden - an evaluation of different sensitivity analysis methods for urban scale building energy models |
| Event: | uSIM2020 - Building to Buildings: Urban and Community Energy Modelling |
| Location: | Edinburgh, UK |
| Dates: | 12 Nov 2020 - 12 Nov 2020 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Publisher version: | http://www.ibpsa.org/usim-2020-proceedings |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Bartlett School Env, Energy and Resources UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10149644 |
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