CITYSIM simulation: the case study of Alt-Wiedikon, a neighbourhood of Zürich City

As research in building energy demand simulation is reaching maturity, there is now a growing interest in the evaluation of the energy need of larger and/or pre-existing urban areas [1, 2, 3], to evaluate the energy performance associated with alternative development or improvement scenarios. These past years, the urban energy use simulator CitySim was developed at EPFL based on multiple physical models. CitySim can compute an estimation of the on-site energy use for heating, cooling and lighting; however for this it needs a complete physical description of the buildings in the form of an XML input file. To simulate just a few buildings, it is convenient to simply enter this information manually through a graphical user interface; but when buildings are counted in hundreds or thousands, a more efficient method is required: data handling in databases. This paper describes the methodology used to take best advantage of PostgreSQL and QuantumGIS to manage the inputs needed by CitySim and the large amount of results produced. It describes the database structure used for the case study and the working principle of the Java tool that links the database and CitySim. The methodology was successfully applied to simulate a case-study neighbourhood of Zürich City and produced useful energy demand graphs.

Zürich Stadtspital Triemli Personalhäuser – Resource assessment of structural elements

Maléna Bastien Masse, Julie Rachel Devènes, Corentin Jean Dominique Fivet, Célia Marine Küpfer

The Triemli Personalhäuser are three equal 15-story buildings located on the Zürich Triemli Stadtspital campus and erected between 1964 and 1969. Cast-in-place reinforced concrete (RC) slabs and walls form the building cores and their surrounding corridors. The rooms are arranged around these cores. The load-bearing intermediate walls, made of prefabricated masonry, support thin precast slabs used as permanent forms. A RC layer is cast over these precast slabs and connects the room slabs with the cast-in-place slabs of the corridors and cores. The self-supporting facade consists of precast RC panels. The City of Zürich plans the deconstruction of these three buildings, thus making available a large amount of RC elements composing the structure and the facades of these buildings. Little-known and rarely implemented, the reuse of concrete elements from obsolete buildings in new projects is a sustainable approach that promotes a circular economy. When reusing, the components of obsolete buildings are carefully dismantled without being crushed. They are then cleaned, possibly repaired or trimmed, and reused without many transformations in a new project, maintaining their shapes, technologies, and mechanical properties. In addition to maintaining the embodied energy and history of the reused components, reuse allows the construction industry to reduce demolition waste, greenhouse gas emissions, and material consumption. This report is a preliminary resource assessment and aims at inventorying and assessing all structural elements of the Triemli Personalhäuser, focusing on their potential value for reuse. Both precast and cast-in-place RC elements are included. They are part of the load-bearing structure or are self-supporting such as the precast facade elements. The proposed methodology allows identifying all properties needed to evaluate the potential for reuse of an element: geometry, material properties, current condition, aesthetics, accessibility, resistance, future durability and environmental impacts. After reviewing available reports and drawings on the buildings, onsite visits are carried out to complete the information and visually inspect the structural elements. During the inspection, the elements are assessed with regards to their suitability for reuse and their condition is classified into a five-grade scale. The investigations are completed with destructive and non-destructive testing of the material properties. Together, Buildings A, B and C are made up of approximately 7 000 m3 of materials constituting their load-bearing system, with approximately 2 500 m3 of precast concrete, 3 400 m3 of cast-in-place concrete and 1 100 m3 of masonry. Of this total, approximately 4% of the volume is dropped from the analysis due to the bad condition of the elements, namely the balcony slabs, the roof slab, and the external stairs. The other elements are in a good or acceptable condition and ae inventoried and analysed in detail. The inventoried elements are divided into 5 categories: (1) facade elements; (2) slab elements; (3) wall elements; (4) column elements; and (5) staircases. Each of these categories are subdivided into a certain number of element types for which a complete factsheet is prepared, including pictures, drawings and useful information on their condition. The volume and weight of each element types are given, as well as their share of the total material volume. The embodied global warming potential (in kgCO2eq) for fabrication and demolition of the elements is also calculated. The results of the investigation on material properties confirm sufficient compressive strength for all elements. The carbonation depths measured on the cores are lower than the cover thickness of the reinforcement. Thus, the concrete is not carbonated in the reinforcement areas and the risk of corrosion is kept low, insuring a good durability of the elements. This document should serve as a base for designing and planning future reuse applications for the concrete elements extracted when deconstructing the Triemli Personalhäuser. The information presented here will help the planners to prioritize the reuse strategy on the elements in the best conditions, with the largest volume share and thus with the largest embodied global warming potential.

EPFL2022

Predictive approach for schema evolution

Hassina Bounif

In today's companies and organizations, databases are omnipresent. They are the means to represent and store information. Therefore, they must evolve whenever the information architecture (semantic and structure) changes. Databases are subject to evolution for several reasons that include the changes to the real-world or the emergence of new database user requirements. We may also consider non representational and non-functional aspects such as the technology and performance requirements. Those can also compel the database designer or administrator to change the database in order to be more optimal and adapted to those requirements. This thesis proposes to address the schema evolution problem by anticipating the potential changes for the evolution of the schema. The approach adopts the a priori perspective i.e. to plan in advance for a possible solution that makes a schema evolve over time. Such a solution works with both a set of assumptions and techniques. The elaborated approach is based on different components: • First, we propose to develop a schema repository which contains a wide number of heterogeneous schemas and their historical versions. This repository serves in a series of operations that are important for the study of the schemas such as selecting the pertinent schemas, building the change matrices and performing the data-mining process. • Second, we propose to develop a requirements ontology, meaning to say a domain ontology that describes the current concepts of a database as well as the concepts that represent the potential future requirements that could be part of the evolution. The method of construction of this ontology includes several phases such as the preparation of the data for this ontology, the establishment of the data-dictionary besides change perspectives that store the concepts that are associated to other concepts by relationships resulting from the application of the data-mining process, the evaluation of the domain ontology using a graph structure and finally the construction of the ontology using a set of procedures. • Third, we propose to develop a predicted schema which is a database schema that contains two types of metadata. The metadata, that represents current entities of the database and the metadata that represents potential future entities. The predicted schema has two methods of representation: the multi-representation strategy and the predicted design repository schemas strategy. The schemas with the multi-representation strategy are particular versions of schemas whereas the schemas with the predicted design repository schemas are particular repositories of schemas. • Finally, we propose a case study and an analysis of the approach. The case study to better understand how this approach works and the analysis to show its feasibility, the positive as well as negative aspects.

EPFL2009

An informed environment for inhabited city simulation

In combination with the rapid technical improvements of computers, building large virtual scenes has become a popular field in computer graphics for education, films or games. Often, virtual humans populate scenes such as real reconstructed city, disappeared building or virtual town, and they are expected to provide a real life feeling. The specific aim of this thesis is to perform action planning in order to populate these scenes with virtual humans. To achieve this goal, we use a database dedicated to urban life simulation called an Informed Environment. This report presents a design methodology and associated tools for animation purposes in large scale scenes. We propose a space decomposition of the scene into a set of entities allowing automatic path computing regardless of scene size. In order to achieve human behavioural simulation, we decide to focus on the definition of scene decomposition resulting in the creation of a database. The first stage of this work consisted of building a database simulating "urban knowledge" (knowledge about location and associated functionalities) and virtual perceptions (contact with the ground, object perception etc.). These virtual perceptions, necessary for autonomy simulation, but highly costly in time processor consuming, are simulated through database access corresponding to our Informed Environment. We decided to define an ideal 3D model as a test-bed for concepts and tools, integrating both geometrical and semantical data. We also define rules for the design, storage and display options. The "urban knowledge" attached to a simulation is the base of a generic hierarchical model of space decomposition. This model of space decomposition of the 3D scene is related to a specific type of simulation and directly applied to the modelling of the tridimensional scene. Once the database is created, some tools access the database content for path/action computation, knowledge concerning a place, display optimization, places and objects. As 3D data visibility and verification with associated semantic information are difficult to observe, we have defined some tools for database visualisation, verification and modification (the "applicity" software). These tools have been developed in order to offer assistance to the user during manipulation of three-dimensional data. This system is applied to real reconstructed scenes in the framework of the European project CROSSES, for panic simulation during accident. Our field of research has also been extended to the domain of disability help in order to compute path for people with reduced mobility. Our goal was to define some tools and a few constraint methodology that automatically generate all information needed for simulating autonomous behaviour in an urban environment.

EPFL2001