Neighbour building shading group calculation from CityGML data

In order to account for the neighbor building shading effects into Building Energy Performance simulations, the building models should be enhanced with the geometric information of neighbor building envelope surfaces, taking into account the relative position of the neighbor buildings, with respect to the building of interest and the sun path, over a specific time interval. These surfaces, ranked by their total shading effect, are obtained by the introduced district neighbor shading function (DNS). DNS receives as input building envelope geometric representations from a CityGML file, the longitude and latitude of the district and a time interval of interest and returns the minimal set of shading buildings and surfaces, for the considered time interval. The algorithm is tested on CityGML data from a real district and it is assessed using EnergyPlus simulations.