A data schema for exchanging information between urban building energy models and urban microclimate models in coupled simulations

Understanding and quantifying the interactions between urban microclimate and urban buildings is essential to improve the urban environment and building performance, especially during heatwaves. Most previous studies used tool or application specific data exchange mechanisms that cannot be generalized for other tools or applications. In this paper, we introduce a new flexible and tool-agnostic data schema to facilitate the exchange of data between urban building energy models and urban microclimate models. The JSON schema was tested using a district of 97 buildings in San Francisco and running simulations with CityBES and CityFFD as the urban building energy and microclimate modeling platforms, respectively. Compared with simulation results using the historical weather data, simulation results considering interactions between two models over a two-day heatwave event showed a 5.3°C higher average peak building facade temperature, an 8.9 °C higher average peak air node temperature, and a 19.5% higher peak cooling energy use.