Within the research project "Densification in context of climate change" we are working on the development of methods for interactive planning of densification projects considering climate protection and climate change adaptation. One of the key factors is shading in urban environments. Common tools usually simulate overall models, which leads to long computing times. In order to achieve a high interactivity for this project, the so-called 'voxel - method' was developed.
This method uses discrete volumes of space defined by their x, y and z coordinates. They can be interpreted as pixels in three-dimensional space. This allows shading elements such as trees to be pre-processed and inserted into a base case. Rules for overlapping voxels are used to compute the resulting shading for every hour of the year. In initial use cases, a 97.6% reduction in simulation time was achieved with a mean accordance of 99% in results.
More information can be found in the conference proceedings of SimAUD 2021, which will be published soon ('Voxel based method for real-time calculation of urban shading studies'). A preprint is available at:
Feel free to contact the corresponding staff members at TUM (Martin Gabriel, Jakob Fellner, Roland Reitberger).