The lab developed a bottom up energy demand simulation tool for cities or neighborhoods. From the building footprint, height, its construction year and building usage CESAR-P populates a detailed building model to be simulated with Energy Plus for each of the buildings. Operational parameters such as occupancy, lighting and appliance usage is based on SIA2024/2016 according to the building usage. For the constructional parameters a set of archetypes is defined for nine age classes. Neighboring buildings defined for a site are modeled as shading objects. CESAR-P stands for Combined Energy Simulation And Retrofit in Pyhton.

More advanced options include possibilities to simulate different retrofit scenarios including embodied costs and emissions calculation, evaluate passive cooling potential with window shading and night ventilation or calculating the resulting operational costs and emissions for the simulated energy demand.

The base methodology of CESAR-P regarding building simulation and retrofit is set up according to CESAR Matlab, which was published in following paper:  Danhong Wang, Jonas Landolt, Georgios Mavromatidis, Kristina Orehounig, Jan Carmeliet, CESAR: A bottom-up building stock modelling tool for Switzerland to address sustainable energy transformation strategies, Energy and Buildings, Volume 169, 2018, Pages 9-26, ISSN 0378-7788, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2018.03.020.

The tool is available under the open source AGPL license. If you need the software package under a more permissive license please contact us.

Source code: https://github.com/hues-platform/cesar-p-core

Documentation: https://cesar-p-core.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Download: https://pypi.org/project/cesar-p/

Citation for Version 1.3.0: Leonie Fierz, Urban Energy Systems Lab, Empa. (2021, April 13). hues-platform/cesar-p-core: 1.3.0 (Version 1.3.0).  Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4682881