In this paper we describe new software “CitySim” that has been conceived to support the more sustainable planning of urban settlements. This first version focuses on simulating buildings’ energy flows, but work is also under way to model energy embodied in materials as well as the flows of water and waste and inter-relationships between these flows; likewise their dependence on the urban climat...

We have developed a remote control robot for searching for victims inside buildings during disasters. We used the approach of searching inside buildings by displaying a map. Concerning displays, several studies have been done on constructing 3D indoor maps from laser scan data acquired by a laser scanner. However, it is difficult to construct 3D maps in a vast or complicated space. Conventional...

As part of an architectural modeling project, this paper investigates the problem of understanding and manipulating images of buildings. Our primary motivation is to automatically detect and seamlessly remove unwanted foreground elements from urban scenes. Without explicit handling, these objects will appear pasted as artifacts on the model. Recovering the building facade in a video sequence is...

This paper is part of an effort to develop measurement systems and methods to better predict the performance of wireless sensor and control networks in building applications. Because of the variability in application requirements, the development of measurement methods to assess the performance of wireless sensor networks in buildings is extremely challenging. This paper presents the key challe...

Research on climate change suggests that small improvements in the “sustainability” of buildings can have large effects on greenhouse gas emissions and on energy efficiency in the economy. This paper analyzes the economics of “green” building. First, we analyze a panel of office buildings certified by independent rating agencies, finding that large recent increases in the supply of green buildi...