A Customizable Community-Building-Energy-Modeling Decision Support System (CCBEM-DSS) for Net-Zero Planning in Developing Countries

Buildings contribute to about 40% of global energy-related CO₂ emissions, and reducing energy demand in buildings has become one of the vital components of the current climate change mitigation strategies. Optimizing energy for the urban building stock by energy-efficient retrofits is becoming increasingly popular in developed countries where the functional and construction elements of the stock are uniform, along with the updated stock database already built in desirable standard formats for energy simulation exchange. However, a decision support system to arrive at energy-efficient retrofits for developing countries where the building stock is highly diverse, with varying construction and operational philosophies, and has no readily available datasets of existing stock is highly challenging. To close this gap, this study suggests an adaptable decentralized community building energy simulation and modeling schema using free and open-source tools for retrofit decision-making.