History

The City Energy Analyst (CEA) is the result of close to a decade of research on Urban Energy Systems at the Architecture and Building Systems (A/S) group at ETH Zurich. The A/S group was founded and is led by Arno Schlueter.

The software itself originated from the PhD work of Jimeno Fonseca at the A/S group. There, the first official name, vision, structure, and algorithms of CEA were invented. The main publication describing what the CEA is until today can be found in Fonseca J. A., Thuy-An N., Schlueter A., and Marechal F. (2016). “City Energy Analyst (CEA): Integrated Framework for Analysis and Optimization of Building Energy Systems in Neighborhoods and City Districts.”

The first steps were taken back in 2013, when Jimeno coded the first algorithms of CEA. These algorithms included an adaptation of the ISO13790 for demand simulation at the district scale as well as some algorithms for simulation of hydraulic networks, spatial visualization, and evaluation of renewable energy potentials in ArcGIS. In early 2014, he worked along with Thuy-An Nguyen and Tim Vollrath on an algorithm to optimize energy supply systems in urban and rural areas. In 2015, Daren Thomas joined the development team. He created the first formal interface of CEA in ArcGIS and contributed to the formalization of CEA as a software development project. Anja Willman contributed to the first usability tests with CEA and Jimeno furthermore built this website. This work led to the official release of the City Energy Analyst in 2016.

In early 2016, Jimeno integrated an Agile framework for our operations. This included Kanban boards as well as continuous integration practices in Github. Arno Schlueter took the role of Product Sponsor and Jimeno took the role of Scrum Master of the project. That same year, Gabriel Happle, Shanshan Hsieh, Martin Mosteiro Romero, Amr Elesawy, and Zhongming Shi joined the development team. Gabriel, Martin and Shanshan contributed with the further development of the demand and supply simulation tools. Jimeno built ways to retrieve geospatial data and automate the generation of thermal networks. Amr and Zhongming contributed to the usability tests of CEA. They became what we call today our customer team.

In 2017, under the sponsorship of VEOLIA, Bhargava Sreepathi joined the CEA team. He brought further contributions to the optimisation engine of CEA. In 2019, Reynold Mok joined the team. He contributed to the current web-based interface of CEA. That same year, Daren became our Scrum Master and Jimeno became our Product Owner.

From mid-2020 till early 2022, Shanshan Hsieh sit on the role of Product Owner. Christian Schaffner was the Product Sponsor.

Since 2023, Toni Piëch Foundation has been supporting the development of CEA and the building of the CEA Community. The same time, Zhongming Shi took the role of Product Lead. In early 2024, Reynold Mok took the role of Scrum Master.

Several students, researchers, and enthusiasts have joined the development team of CEA across the years. We thank all of them for their contribution and for being part of the CEA family.

The CEA Team
March 2024