Urban developers are increasingly faced with the need to design projects at massive scales, beyond the experience of designers and the capacity of existing tools, such as the 600-acre Chicago Lakeside Development project on Chicago’s South Side. Argonne and its partners are developing the Lakeside Sustainable Infrastructure Model (LakeSIM) to integrate city design and planning tools with computational modeling tools. By adapting scientific simulations used to model energy demand and supply, environment and climate, or infrastructure to the appropriate scale, LakeSim will improve the ability of urban planners and designers to explore the impacts of changes to design and engineering, zoning, and other aspects of urban design.

LakeSIM has currently integrated with Argonne’s ISOmodel for modeling building energy demand and POLARIS for modeling traffic flow. Planned extensions include coupling of agent models of buildings and traffic and development of models for the electric power grid, gas networks, water distribution systems, and groundwater.