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Tokyo Half Project
 
Projects
Tokyo Half Project: Evaluating CO2 Emission Reduction Using Sustainable Collaboration Platform
A Sustainability Collaboration Platform to Evaluate Energy, Mobility and Building Technologies for a Sustainable Urban System

Principal Investigators
MIT: D.Wallace
UT: K.Hanaki, H.Komiyama, S.Kraines, T.Matsuo, H.Takahashi, K.Yamada, K.Yamaji, Y.Yanagisawa
ETH: D.Favrat, J.Gay, P.Haldi, A.McEvoy, A.Rufer

Goals/Objectives
The objective of the Tokyo Half Project (THP) is to discover integrated systems of ecologically effective and economically rational technologies with the final target of achieving a 50% reduction in the CO2 emissions from the city Tokyo. To achieve this, the project includes three goals as follows:

  • To identify the analytical tools needed to assess building, energy, transportation, and infrastructure, as well as policy alternatives; and
  • To develop a dynamic, holistic simulation modeling system based on model integration over the Internet that allows specialized models of technological and policy alternatives to exchange information in order to comprehensively evaluated their overall impact on the overall system; and
  • To evaluate how new and existing technologies might be integrated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without compromising overall services.

The project has grown out of research at the Global Engineering Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. The project was subsequently expanded to utilize the Distributed Object-based Modeling Environment (DOME), which was initiated by the Computer Aided Design Laboratory at MIT within a previous AGS project (“Holistic Design”).

The expanded research aims to create a prototype of an urban "sustainability collaboration platform," based on distributed peer-to-peer model integration to build networks of integrated system models, with the DOME software infrastructure as the main enabling information technology. This collaboration platform is envisioned as providing an Internet-based knowledge exchange and integration forum that can be used to develop integrated subsystems of technologies and to comprehensively simulate the effects of those integrated subsystems on the entire industrial ecology system of an urban region.

Results/Findings
The project has supported the development of research tools for holistic and collaborative use of knowledge for solving large-scale design problems related to increasing urban sustainability. Methodologies have been developed to integrate simulation models on different aspects of sustainable urban development. The research has also supported the development of a highly robust multi-objective optimization tool based on a new evolutionary algorithm. Individual research groups have developed a large number of simulation models that are needed to carry out case studies, such as models for waste disposal and recycling processes, life cycle design and evaluation of buildings, power grid planning and dispatch, specialized technologies such as solid oxide fuel cells, and energy systems such as hybrid solar cogeneration systems for communities in semi-arid regions.

Based on pilot applications and tests, a completely new third generation implementation of the DOME concept (DOME3) has been completed to ensure the system suitability for widespread and open deployment. DOME3 provides a common Internet-based computational infrastructure that makes the exchange and coordination of related parameters between different simulations a transparent process.

There are three key aspects of the DOME concept and DOME3 implementation:

  • A new philosophy of how to build integrated networks
  • An architectural representation that supports the integration philosophy
  • A software implementation to allow the use of the integration philosophy

The project is based on collaborative research. The UT research on developing integrated technology solutions for GHG emission reduction has benefited from the simulation model development and analysis in ETH/EPFL, and the development of the model integration approach and tools at MIT. The project has also made efforts to collaborate with other AGS projects, including the Value of Knowledge project, the Breakthroughs in Technologies project, and the Technology-Energy-Environment-Health (TEEH) Chain project.

More Information
MIT Cadlab
THP (Japanese)