For many lawmakers, energy-efficient buildings have been the main focus in large cities across the United States. Buildings consume the largest amount of energy and produce the highest amounts of greenhouse emissions. This is especially true for New York City (NYC)’s public and private buildings, which alone emit more than two-thirds of the city’s total greenhouse emissions. Therefore, improvements in building energy efficiency have become an essential target to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption. NYC’s buildings’ historical energy consumption data was used in machine learning models to determine their ENERGY STAR scores for time series analysis and future pre- diction. Machine learning models were used to predict future energy use and answer the question of how to incorporate machine learning for effective decision-making to optimize energy usage within the largest buildings in a city. The results show that grouping buildings by property type, rather than by location, provides better predictions for ENERGY STAR scores.
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Comparative Analysis of Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emission of Diesel and Electric Trucks for Food Distribution in Gowanus District of New York City
New York City’s food distribution system is among the largest in the United States. Food is transported by trucks from twelve major distribution centers to the city’s point-of-sale locations. Trucks consume large amounts of energy and contribute to large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, there is interest to increase the efficiency of New York City’s food distribution system. The Gowanus district in New York City is undergoing rezoning from an industrial zone to a mix residential and industrial zone. It serves as a living lab to test new initiatives, policies, and new infrastructure for electric vehicles. We analyze the impact of electrification of food-distribution trucks on greenhouse gas emissions and electricity demand in this paper. However, such analysis faces the challenges of accessing available and granular data, modeling of demands and deliveries that incorporate logistics and inventory management of different types of food retail stores, delivery route selection, and delivery schedule to optimize food distribution. We propose a framework to estimate truck routes for food delivery at a district level. We model the schedule of food delivery from a distribution center to retail stores as a vehicle routing problem using an optimization solver. Our case study shows that diesel trucks consume 300% more energy than electric trucks and generate 40% more greenhouse gases than diesel trucks for food distribution in the Gowanus district.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1846940
- PAR ID:
- 10315601
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Big Data
- Volume:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2624-909X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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