Smart Cities Based on Good Models

Here energy is the starting point, but other aspects of city resource use, transportation processes, risk analyses and other goal and future predictive models should also be included with a base foundational descriptive model to work from.   

Modeling Every Building in America Starts with Chattanooga
Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
Rachel Harken

A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed a building energy model that automatically extracts high-level building data from publicly available information. The team demonstrated its new approach by using the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's (OLCF's) Cray XK7 Titan supercomputer to model the energy usage of every building serviced by the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga, TN. The supercomputer found the electric utility could save between $11 million and $35 million a year by adjusting electricity usage during critical peak times. Said ORNL’s Joshua New, "We're not just creating these models and doing what-if analyses in the blind. We have an error rate for every building on how closely we're matching that 15-minute energy use."  ... "