Using 3D CityGML for the Modeling of the Food Waste and Wastewater Generation—A Case Study for the City of Montréal

Abstract

The paper explains a workflow to simulate the food energy water (FEW) nexus for an urban district combining various data sources like 3D city models, particularly the City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) data model from the Open Geospatial Consortium, Open StreetMap and Census data. A long term vision is to extend the CityGML data model by developing a FEW Application Domain Extension (FEW ADE) to support future FEW simulation workflows such as the one explained in this paper. Together with the mentioned simulation workflow, this paper also identifies some necessary FEW related parameters for the future development of a FEW ADE. Furthermore, relevant key performance indicators are investigated, and the relevant datasets necessary to calculate these indicators are studied. Finally, different calculations are performed for the downtown borough Ville-Marie in the city of Montréal (Canada) for the domains of food waste (FW) and wastewater (WW) generation. For this study, a workflow is developed to calculate the energy generation from anaerobic digestion of FW and WW. In the first step, the data collection and preparation was done. Here relevant data for georeferencing, data for model set-up, and data for creating the required usage libraries, like food waste and wastewater generation per person, were collected. The next step was the data integration and calculation of the relevant parameters, and lastly, the results were visualized for analysis purposes. As a use case to support such calculations, the CityGML level of detail two model of Montréal is enriched with information such as building functions and building usages from OpenStreetMap. The calculation of the total residents based on the CityGML model as the main input for Ville-Marie results in a population of 72,606. The statistical value for 2016 was 89,170, which corresponds to a deviation of 15.3%. The energy recovery potential of FW is about 24,024 GJ/year, and that of wastewater is about 1,629 GJ/year, adding up to 25,653 GJ/year. Relating values to the calculated number of inhabitants in Ville-Marie results in 330.9 kWh/year for FW and 22.4 kWh/year for wastewater, respectively.

Digital Twin Smart City: Integrating IFC and CityGML with Semantic Graph for Advanced 3D City Model Visualization

“…In 2021, Braun et al [ 43 ] utilized 3D CityGML to model food waste and wastewater patterns in the city of Montreal. Employing the 3D CityGML framework, they conducted simulations to discern trends in waste generation and dispersion throughout the urban landscape.…”

Urban Digital Twins Empowering Energy Transition: Citizen-Driven Sustainable Urban Transformation towards Positive Energy Districts

“…Inspired by the concept of Energy ADE, a recent JPI Urban Europe project IN-SOURCE ("INtegrated analysis and modelling for the management of sustainable urban food water energy ReSOURCEs") developed a Food-Water-Energy (FWE) ADE data model to study the nexus of food, water and energy systems (Padsala et al, 2021). Within IN-SOURCE, different renewable potential workflows such as photovoltaic potential (roofs, fac ¸ade and open field) (Bao et al, 2023), bio-energy (Bao et al, 2020), AgriPV (Bao et al, 2022) and energy recovery from food and water waste (Braun et al, 2021) were developed in SimStadt and successfully tested using FWE ADE enriched CityGML building and landuse model of the entire district of Ludwigsburg in Germany. In a different JPI Urban Europe project, SUNEX ("Sustainable Urban food water energy NEXus"), the energy demand model MAED-City (Model for evaluation of energy demand of City) was adapted and used to project future long-term final energy demand of the cities Vienna, Berlin, Bristol and Doha.…”

Conceptualising an Urban Digital Twin Framework for Simulating the Impact of Household Consumption Choices on the Carbon Footprint of Urban Neighborhoods

“…Additionally, FWE ADE was deployed as a central data exchange platform to exchange data between SimStadt and a FWE land use simulator UD InfraSim to simulate future biomass potential of a land-use scenario influenced by climate, population and urban development changes in Vienna (Padsala et al, 2021a). (Braun et al, 2021) identified new objects and attributes which can be a part of FWE ADE supporting circular economy workflows, such as energy recovery from food waste and water waste with a potential to extend it for storing carbon emissions stemming from household consumption of food type (plant-based or animalbased) and that from the transportation of food waste to the loc-ation of landfills.…”