Using building energy simulation and geospatial analysis to determine building and transportation related energy use

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), building and transportation sectors account for approximately 75% of CO₂ emissions. Given the magnitude of this statistic, many studies have been directed towards the issue of energy use and carbon emissions of the built environment. Most of these studies however, have focused only on either buildings or transportation systems. To analyze the dynamics of energy use associated with buildings and transportation systems, it is essential to explore the interactions between these two sectors in a single comprehensive model. This paper develops a network infrastructure model to determine the transportation energy intensity of a building as well as building energy consumption based on the residents' lifestyle. The proposed model is developed using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Building Information Modeling (BIM) to identify the current trends in energy use associated with people behavior and infrastructure (buildings and transportation networks). BIM is used as a life cycle inventory to model and collect building-related information and material quantities, and GIS is used to define geo-referenced locations, storing attribute data, and displaying data on maps. The main input to the model would be characteristics of buildings and transportation networks, and socioeconomic data (population dynamics) collected from a survey. The model then generates the energy and carbon implications of the network in the form of a map.