SimStadt
SimStadt is an urban simulation environment actively developed at HFT Stuttgart. It originated from a research project completed in 2015 (SimStadt), followed by SimStadt 2.0 (final report in German here).
SimStadt uses CityGML data of real urban environments for energy analyses of buildings, city quarters, whole cities and even regions. The application scenarios range from high-resolution simulations of building heating requirements and potential studies for photovoltaics to the simulation of building refurbishment and renewable energy supply scenarios. Recent developments include the modeling of urban trees, detailed shadowing calculations, load profile generation, energy grid simulation, heat storage simulation, and the use of PVGIS as the default weather data source.
SimStadt is currently used in multiple research projects, including:
- SektorSim³ — Mobility, energy, and heat transition in urban districts, studying interactions between heat pumps, photovoltaics, and electric mobility.
- CircularGreenSimCity — Holistic resource-efficient analysis of urban districts, covering building materials, green infrastructure, water, energy, and mobility.
- Ind-Supply — Climate and resource-optimized heat supply for industrial areas, developing digital planning tools for sustainable heating solutions.
SimStadt v2 has been released, and is available here!
The source code is expected to be open-sourced by the end of 2026.