Exploiting the Potential of Integrated Public Building Data: Energy Performance Assessment of the Building Stock in a Case Study in Northern Italy

Smart management of urban built environment relies on the availability of data supporting sound policy making and guiding city renovation processes toward more sustainable and performant models. Nevertheless, public managers are unlikely to have comprehensive information on the existing building stock. In addition, tools providing effective insights on potential costs and benefits of retrofit strategies at city/district scale are hardly available. This article describes how data related to existing buildings may be effectively combined together into a so-called Building Information System, and discusses the advantages and shortcomings related to this process. At the same time, the implementation on a real case study in northern Italy demonstrates how the effort due to data harmonization and integration is able to foster applications to support policy makers in the management of the built environment and in the definition of urban sustainability strategies. Building data were harmonized according to the requirements of the international open standard CityGML, therefore facilitating the exchange of building information. The whole project was carried out while considering the characteristics of data sources that are available for each public body in Italy and, as a consequence, it may be replicated to other Italian municipalities.