Applying Climate-based Daylight Modeling (cbdm) for a Macro Scale Master Plan Design Case Study: the Great City in China

Climate-Based Daylight Modelling (CBDM) is a methodology that allows the prediction of several measures of daylight using the sky condition from location specific meteorological data. CBDM was originally used as a means for predicting indoor daylight availability and intensity. Since the scalability of the method has been proved it has been applied at different architectural scales for different studies, for example monthly cumulative irradiance and annual hourly illuminance level. Challenges in applying a CBDM methodology to large-scale projects are the high demands of time and computational capacity. Moreover a limitation on the simulation tools’ capacity regarding the number of measuring points limits the applicability of the study on large-scale projects. To extend the usage of CBDM to large-scale projects, this paper introduces an automated method for using multiple systems simultaneously and thus benefit from the advantages of cloud computing. This enables the application of climate-based daylight modelling for large-scale projects within a reasonable time. To illustrate its applicability, this paper selects a real project as a case study to describe how the method has been used in the application of CBDM for evaluating master plan options for a new urban design project in China during the conceptual design phase.