Abstract
To reduce greenhouse gases emissions related to the building sector and to make informed decisions about sustainable building design and urban planning, building energy simulation should be adopted as a supporting tool by designers and policy makers. However, since building simulation is extremely time-consuming, its application is limited in daily design work. This research aims at testing a new simplification algorithm proposed for Urban Building Energy Modeling to reduce the computational complexity of thermal models in favor of the simulation speed without compromising accuracy. The procedure was applied on two educational buildings of complex shapes located in Bolzano, Italy. Results show that the simplified models reduced the simulation time up to 135 times, with building level relative annual deviations lower than 6 %.