SUSIC

SUSIC: Smart Utilities and Sustainable Infrastructure Change

Background

Cities and regions are not static entities, but dynamic systems in which numerous different actors interact, whose development is influenced by external factors and at the same time can be partly endogenously controlled by internal processes. The reduction of barriers to cooperation and the facilitation of transformation processes can be furthered through participatory approaches; however, the energy and urban water management as well as the climate policy design capacity of local government with regard to the transformation of urban and regional infrastructure systems is often limited and many innovations for sustainability transformations take place on private land and thus not in public space. This requires the inclusion of a large and heterogeneous group of actors in infrastructure development in the form of property owners, who are characterized by specific logics of action and decision-making and who make decisions largely autonomously. For the successful further development of infrastructures, solutions must be found to combine autonomous decisions of the landowners with the system logics of the supply and disposal companies with little conflict.

However, there is a lack of easy-to-use integrated computer models that allow utilities to assess the economic and environmental success, co-benefits and risks associated with projects for the successive transformation of urban and regional infrastructures in the context of uncertain economic and political framework conditions.

Project objective

The aim of the project is to assess the success, co-benefits and risks associated with the implementation of projects for the transformation of urban and regional spaces by linking advanced IT methods and innovative approaches from infrastructure research. Thematically, the project focuses on the evaluation of integrated municipal and regional infrastructure systems for the provision of energy and water as well as for the disposal of wastewater, which are operated by actors and changed over time through investment and deconstruction decisions.

The transformation of infrastructures resulting from the interplay of time-changing demographic and economic conditions and government interventions to promote sustainability is analysed using agent-based and integrated models. The overall objective of the research project is to further develop the relevant decision-making structures with regard to the increasing demands in the future.

This goal is addressed by an agent-based model for decisions of private property owners on rooftop photovoltaic systems, as well as a model specification for the decision-making behaviour of institutional flat owners on decentralized rainwater management systems. As computer-based tools, these serve to understand and evaluate transformation processes and pathways. The model of the Chair of Energy Management and Sustainability aims at a model for the diffusion (penetration of the modelled system) of rooftop photovoltaics (rooftop solar systems) among homeowners in the independent city of Leipzig, while the Chair of Environmental Engineering and Management investigates the diffusion of infiltration systems and green roofs on the part of housing associations in typical, regulatory heterogeneous regional contexts.

This work serves to expand the techno-economic system level of the planning instruments used so far by a socio-economic actor level, which attempts to adequately represent the behaviour of this new type of actor group and, in this synthesis, represents an innovative approach with the help of which the future development of urban energy and wastewater systems can be analysed.

Approach

The main objective of the project is the joint development of an empirically founded, agent-based simulation platform that can serve as a virtual test laboratory for the evaluation of new business models and as an instrument for risk assessment. This is done as an extension of the computer model IRPopt for the integrated mapping of municipal energy supply companies and the decentralized technology adapters in a mutually influencing system.

The subprojects being worked on with the participation of the University of Leipzig include (1) the creation of a generic platform for agent-based modelling, (2) the modelling of the energy technology investment behaviour of (decentralized) prosumers in the electricity sector, (3) the identification and modelling of local innovations in urban water management, (4) the description and modelling of the decision-making behaviour of property owners with the help of agent-based modelling, (5) the software implementation of the model and its embedding in the existing technical model infrastructure IRPsim, and (6) the measurement of the economic effects on regional value creation and the regional labour market.

Benefits

By using the developed software, energy and water supply and disposal companies are enabled to evaluate the economic success and the risks associated with the implementation of projects for the successive transformation of urban and regional infrastructures.

The integration of the technical-economic optimization perspective of central infrastructure operators with the socio-economic simulation perspective of decentralized decision-makers represents an innovative approach that can be used to analyse the future development of urban energy systems. With this approach, the repercussions of the investment and behavioural decisions of municipal actors and institutional organizations on the performance of the energy supply system as well as the sewage system can be recorded. On this basis, integrative transformation paths for the socio-ecological development of municipal infrastructure solutions can be evaluated, taking into account the actor-specific potentials and technical possibilities, and recommendations can be made as to the extent to which integrated techno-economic modelling can be used in a targeted manner to identify measures and promote design options.