Energy production from solar radiation is becoming increasingly important in the light of current environmental challenges. With this in mind, current research aims to combine solar energy generation with urban planning in order to maximise efficiency. The goal is to evaluate the potential of building roofs located in urban areas for producing solar energy.

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The iCeBOUND CTI project created a Decision Support System prototype that leverages 3D digital urban data to facilitate environmental analyses in cities. The industrial and governmental partners intended to use this application in production and needed a sustainable deployment model for the future.

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However, since the clients of the software were not able to acquire hardware specifically for this purpose, this computationally time-intensive prototype needed to be ported and migrated to generic Cloud infrastructures. In the first support project for the iCeBOUND consortium, the application was ported to run on public Cloud infrastructures, and made portable in order to be future-proof. Further technical details can be found here.

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Building on this success, a second support project for the consortium was delivered that produced an optimized GPU deployment. This led to both reduced calculation times, and further reductions in the the costs of solar energy potentials. This deployment has the potential to allow the calculation of a whole city at once, something of great value to the iCeBOUND consortium.