**5. Conclusion**

This work demonstrated that the wind environment in the low-rise area and the high-rise area are characterized by high building density and the pronounced urban roughness. Wind speed was 0.04–0.09 m/s lower in the high-rise area than in the middle-rise area and 0.04–0.14 m/s lower in the low-rise area than in the middle-rise area. Wind speed is 0.19–0.27 m/s lower in the high-rise area than in the mixed-rise area and 0.21–0.28 m/s lower in the low-rise area than in the mixed-rise area. Overall, the balance between building height and building ratio should be considered in future urban development projects. The information from this work provides information useful to the cultivation of environmental urban policy.

Overall, high-density urban residential and commercial development is providing a big impact on the urban wind environment and urban thermal environment. While this gives hints for UHI mitigation during the day, and it creates physical obstacles for heat release during the nights. A lower SVF reduces the urban radiation absorption from the Sun, but also reduces the outgoing longwave radiation from the urban surfaces. The spread of air pollution is affected by the wind turbulence around high buildings. Future studies should consider more detailes of the layout and volume of high-rise buildings in urban development projects to reduce urban climate change. The results of this study provide clues for related environmental urban development mechanisim in Chinese cities as well as in the other cities in all over the world.

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### **Author details**

Wang Yupeng\*, Ma Dixuan, Li Man and Zhou Dian

\*Address all correspondence to: wang-yupeng@outlook.com

Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China

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Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China

76 Sustainable Cities - Authenticity, Ambition and Dream

\*Address all correspondence to: wang-yupeng@outlook.com


**Chapter 5**

**Provisional chapter**

**Multi-criteria Spatial Decision Support System for**

**Multi-criteria Spatial Decision Support System for** 

**Methodological Approach**

**Methodological Approach**

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.80883

information system (GIS)

**1. Introduction**

**Abstract**

Sara Torabi Moghadam and Patrizia Lombardi

Sara Torabi Moghadam and Patrizia Lombardi

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

**Urban Energy Planning: An Interdisciplinary Integrated**

**Urban Energy Planning: An Interdisciplinary Integrated** 

The present chapter provides an interdisciplinary integrated methodological framework. This framework guides to develop a multi-criteria spatial decision support system (MC-SDSS) to support decision-making processes in urban energy planning (UEP) purposes. The MC-SDSS helps in evaluation and visualization of the results of different UEP scenarios involving the relative stakeholders and decision-makers (DMs) from the early stage of planning. This will help in defining and evaluating energy-saving scenarios taking into account the participation of stakeholders in an interactive way. The meaning of integrating different tools and methods in this framework is due to their complementarity in fulfilling various tasks in the UIEP process. This fact can help to assess, over a short-/longterm period, the mix of measures by analysing meaningful scenarios focused on energy consumptions, environmental impacts and economic and social aspects. The result is the development of a new MC-SDSS, which is an interactive energetic plug-in in GIS environment using CommunityViz. This tool has been applied to a demonstrator case study, related to a medium-sized city of the metropolitan area of Turin. However, the methodology used for delivering the tool can be applied to other contexts due to its flexibility.

**Keywords:** interactive energy retrofitting scenarios, spatial planning support system: an interdisciplinary integrated methodological approach, geographic

Sustainability contests represent a fundamental challenge to traditional urban development practices and concepts. Reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas

> © 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,

distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.80883

#### **Multi-criteria Spatial Decision Support System for Urban Energy Planning: An Interdisciplinary Integrated Methodological Approach Multi-criteria Spatial Decision Support System for Urban Energy Planning: An Interdisciplinary Integrated Methodological Approach**

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.80883

Sara Torabi Moghadam and Patrizia Lombardi Sara Torabi Moghadam and Patrizia Lombardi

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.80883

#### **Abstract**

The present chapter provides an interdisciplinary integrated methodological framework. This framework guides to develop a multi-criteria spatial decision support system (MC-SDSS) to support decision-making processes in urban energy planning (UEP) purposes. The MC-SDSS helps in evaluation and visualization of the results of different UEP scenarios involving the relative stakeholders and decision-makers (DMs) from the early stage of planning. This will help in defining and evaluating energy-saving scenarios taking into account the participation of stakeholders in an interactive way. The meaning of integrating different tools and methods in this framework is due to their complementarity in fulfilling various tasks in the UIEP process. This fact can help to assess, over a short-/longterm period, the mix of measures by analysing meaningful scenarios focused on energy consumptions, environmental impacts and economic and social aspects. The result is the development of a new MC-SDSS, which is an interactive energetic plug-in in GIS environment using CommunityViz. This tool has been applied to a demonstrator case study, related to a medium-sized city of the metropolitan area of Turin. However, the methodology used for delivering the tool can be applied to other contexts due to its flexibility.

**Keywords:** interactive energy retrofitting scenarios, spatial planning support system: an interdisciplinary integrated methodological approach, geographic information system (GIS)

## **1. Introduction**

Sustainability contests represent a fundamental challenge to traditional urban development practices and concepts. Reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

emissions from urban infrastructure and building stock towards low-carbon cities requires a supportive planning process. In this regard, the use of appropriate tools and methods in order to address complex interactions of urban integrated energy planning (UIEP) processes is needed [1]. However, there is still not an integrated method to meet the urban integrated energy planning (UIEP) purposes [2]. In the mentioned study, the necessary approaches, which are needed to create the future urban energy consumption paths for scenario analysis, are described. Particularly, the importance of using geographic information system (GIS) for calculating, managing, storing and visualizing data at the urban scale is highlighted.

The chapter discusses in detail the steps design of methodological approach of a new integrated multi-criteria spatial decision support system (MC-SDSS) to evaluate and visualize the results of different UIEP scenarios involving the relative stakeholders and decision-makers (DMs) from the early stage of planning [3]. This will help in defining and evaluating energysaving scenarios taking into account the participation of stakeholders in an interactive way. The meaning of integrating different tools and methods in this framework is due to their complementarity in fulfilling various tasks in the UIEP process.

The proposed methodology framework is explained in Section 2. Afterwards, Section 3 illustrates the first results of the methodology application. Finally, some concluding and limitation remarks of this study are given in Section 4.
