Feb 18, 2018 - 6 min read

Lesser-Known Software for Planners

Depending on the exact nature or specialization of their work, urban planners might use certain software tools in their day-to-day work, such as

But there are some other lesser-known but quite powerful software tools that planners should consider incorporating into their workflows. This post is meant to be a high-level overview of these programs and their capabilities and use cases. More in-depth tutorials coming soon!

EnergyPlus

Official description from the website:

EnergyPlus™ is a whole building energy simulation program that engineers, architects, and researchers use to model both energy consumption—for heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting and plug and process loads—and water use in buildings.

In other words, EnergyPlus is software for energy modeling - simulating the energy performance of a building from an input file describing its geometry and characteristics and a weather file describing the local climate.

EnergyPlus (frequently abbreviated as EPlus or E+) is developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and can trace its origins to the energy crisis of the 1970s and the recognition of the role buildings play in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. EPlus has a cross-platform command-line interface that accepts input files in IDF (which describes the geometry and characteristics of the simulated building) and EPW (which contains weather data for the climate where the building will be located) formats and outputs several files in various formats. Although the Windows version ships with a bare-bones graphical menu, the more likely method with which you will find yourself interacting with EnergyPlus is by using another software package that wraps the EnergyPlus simulation engine with its own graphical user interface with some 3D modeling capabilities for creating the building's geometry. Two of the more popular of these methods are OpenStudio and DesignBuilder.

Planners who are familiar with SketchUp should definitely give OpenStudio a look, as ships with a plugin that allows you to create the geometry in SketchUp and run energy and daylight performance simulations on your SketchUp models.

In addition, a new feature in v8.8 improves the simulation of energy performance in an urban context, and NREL is looking to use EnergyPlus and OpenStudio for city-scale energy simulations in their URBANOpt platform.

Stormwater Management Model

According to the website, SWMM

is used throughout the world for planning, analysis, and design related to stormwater runoff, combined and sanitary sewers, and other drainage systems.

The user manual enumerates typical applications:

  • design and sizing of drainage system components for flood control
  • sizing of detention facilities and their appurtenances for flood control and water quality protection
  • flood plain mapping of natural channel systems
  • designing control strategies for minimizing combined sewer overflows
  • evaluating the impact of inflow and infiltration on sanitary sewer overflows
  • generating non-point source pollutant loadings for waste load allocation studies
  • evaluating the effectiveness of Best Management Practices for reducing wet weather pollutant loadings

SWMM is developed and maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency. SWMM is even older than EPlus (first released in 1971!). Looking at the input file format leads one to suspect it probably used to be on punchcards.

Similar to EnergyPlus, there is a low-level simulation engine that accepts input files of parameters which produces output files of simulation results and a bare-bones Windows GUI. There is also a QGIS Plugin and Python wrappers for SWMM as well.

MOVES

EPA's MOtor Vehicle Emission Simulator (MOVES) is a state-of-the-science emission modeling system that estimates emissions for mobile sources at the national, country, and project level for criteria air pollutants, greenhouse gases, and air toxics.

Like SWMM, MOVES is developed by the EPA and is intended to simulate the emissions and pollutants generated by "mobile sources" (mostly automobiles). The user defines simulation parameters (called a RunSpec in MOVES terminology) including vehicle types, time periods, geographic areas (U.S. state or county level), pollutants, vehicle operating characteristics, and road types. MOVES then runs its simulations and calculates the total emissions and emission rates per vehicle or unit of activity.

The main use case for MOVES is analyses supporting Air Quality Implementation Plans, but planners could also find it useful for scenario planning. One example could be quantifying the reductions in air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions that could result from a plan to shift vehicle trips to transit or active transportation.

Radiance

Radiance is a suite of programs for the analysis and visualizations of lighting design.

Input files specify the scene geometry, materials, luminaires, time, date and sky conditions (for daylight calculations). Calculated values include spectral radiance (i.e. luminance + color), irradiance (illuminance + color) and glare indices. Simulation results may be displayed as color images, numerical values and contour plots.

Radiance can produce studio-quality renderings from plain-text input files with the parameters listed in the quote above. Radiance is typically associated with architects designing daylighting aspects of individual buildings, but planners could find it useful too. For example, Radiance could be used to quantify the typical amount of natural daylight gained or lost when considering increasing or decreasing density during a zoning code rewrite. Radiance can be incorporated into an OpenStudio workflow.

PVWatts

NREL's PVWatts® Calculator estimates the energy production and cost of energy of grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) energy systems throughout the world. It allows homeowners, small building owners, installers and manufacturers to easily develop estimates of the performance of potential PV installations.

Like EnergyPlus, PVWatts is a tool developed by NREL that estimates the photovoltaic (PV) electricity production from a few simply inputs (a street address is enough to get started). Unlike EnergyPlus, PVWatts is meant to be simple to use by non-expert users, although advanced users can derive great utility from it as well. Software developers should investigate the API.

OpenTripPlanner

OpenTripPlanner (OTP) is a family of open source software projects that provide passenger information and transportation network analysis services. The core server-side Java component finds itineraries combining transit, pedestrian, bicycle, and car segments through networks built from widely available, open standard OpenStreetMap and GTFS data. This service can be accessed directly via its web API or using a range of Javascript client libraries, including modern reactive modular components targeting mobile platforms.

OTP combines OpenStreetMap and GTFS data into a graph, making it an invaluable tool for anyone doing network or accessibility analysis. See this excellent post from the unfortunately now-defunct OpenPlans for more on the kinds of analysis one can do with GTFS data.

SUMO

"Simulation of Urban MObility" (SUMO) is an open source, highly portable, microscopic and continuous road traffic simulation package designed to handle large road networks.

SUMO can simulate many aspects of ground-based traffic, both for vehicles and pedestrians. It ships with its own GUI and has tools for importing OpenStreetMap road data for use in its simulations.

UrbanSim

UrbanSim leverages state-of-the-art urban simulation, 3D visualization, and shared open data to empower users to explore, gain insights into, and develop and evaluate alternative plans to improve their communities. UrbanSim is a simulation platform for supporting planning and analysis of urban development, incorporating the interactions between land use, transportation, the economy, and the environment.

UrbanSim is a Python library that leverages the power of Pandas for urban development scenario planning and forecasting. Planners with some data analysis skills using Python, Pandas, and/or Jupyter Notebooks should definitely explore UrbanSim.

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2018-02-18