SIMGIS : GIS FOR THERMAL SIMULATIONS IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT AUTHORS
Building simulation programs perform thermal simulations in a stand-alone scenario and, therefore, the resulting building automation is unable to handle a broad scenario of environmental changes. Due to the time needed for a building to react properly to short-term sudden weather changes, standard building automation is not enough to control energy consumption and thermal comfort efficiently: the sensors placed on the external envelop of a building provide information about weather changes too short in advance about weather changes. A meteorological station can inform in advance a group of buildings in an area about weather changes, but is unable, unlike a GIS, to identify the buildings which are really interested in the phenomenon and to send the weather changes information only to those buildings. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) has developed a new methodology to optimize building thermal performances by utilizing GIS, simulation, on line meteorological data and building automation.
The integration of communications networks in the intelligent building
Abstract An Intelligent Building Communications Network (IBN) is a ubiquitous network that integrates Telecommunications, an Intelligent Building Information System (IBIS) and Business Resources over a digital communications platform and has interoperability between systems. Implementation of an IBN is dependent on the migration of IBIS communications networks into the domain of telecommunication and the adoption of Open Systems Interconnection to standardise protocol development. A mechanism suitable to achieve this goal is the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), a fully managed switched network service based on a 64 Kbps channel.
Impacts of climate and land use changes on flood risk management for the Schijn River, Belgium
Abstract Flooding is the most common natural disaster in Europe. Modern flood risk management relies not only infrastructure development but also on governmental and non-governmental actors applying legal, economic and communicative water management instruments. Within the European Union (EU), flood management closely relies on policy set at the EU and national levels. It is now recognized that a sound understanding of climate change is required in addition to current management by taking into account land use change and socio-political context, as climate and land use changes have major impacts on hydrological responses. This paper investigates the hydrological behavior due to urbanization under current and future climate scenarios of high summer and high winter rainfall for 20 sub-catchments of the Schijn River, located in the Flanders region near Antwerp, Belgium. As urbanization increases and existing rainfall-runoff models neglecting the specific behavior of urban runoff, a hydrological model was developed based on a basic reservoir concept and applied to the existing rainfall-runoff model (PDM) flow to examine the specific urban contribution. Results revealed that peak flow for urban runoff and the total peak flow (i.e. rural and urban runoff) were significantly higher (i.e. ranges from 200% to 500%) than the existing rainfall-runoff model (PDM) flows, because of faster and more peaked urban runoff response. The impact of climate change on current and future conditions was also assessed by estimating peak flows with respect to return periods from the flood frequency curve. The predicted peak flow of high summer future climate scenario was significantly higher (i.e. ranges from 200% to 250%) than that of the current climatic condition for this region. Furthermore, hourly peak flow and daily volume ratios of 100-year return period for the highest, lowest and average impervious area were projected for the time horizon of the year 2100. It is concluded that climate change impacts contribute the most in producing peak flow in coming years, while increased urbanization takes the second place for both hourly and daily values. Results on urbanization effect and climate change impact assessment are useful to the water managers for spatial planning, emergency planning and insurance industry.