A Comprehensive Review of Applications and Feedback Impact of Microclimate on Building Operation and Energy

With climate change affecting buildings differently across various local climates, there's a heightened focus on local microclimates and their impact on building energy consumption. Urban microclimates change the buildings' energy dynamics by influencing local weather patterns while building operations affect these patterns and microclimates through feedback. This paper provides a comprehensive review of tools and applications used for examining the feedback interaction between building operation and energy, and urban microclimate. This study collects, analyses, and classifies tools and applications related to Urban Building Energy Modeling (UBEM) and Urban Climate Modeling (UCM) and particularly focuses on the combination of these tools through Multi-Domain Urban Scale Energy Modeling (MD-USEM), enabling efficient information exchange between urban microclimate and building energy models. The building-microclimate exchange of information may occur as either a one-way impact or a two-way interaction, a distinction that is thoroughly examined in the final section with an in-depth analysis of the relevant literature.