Cross-examination of country-specific archetypes generation for urban building energy modelling (UBEM)

• State-of-the-art international overview of building archetype creation. • Review of two current research projects, highlighting developments in the field. • High (literature review) and in-depth level (project case study reviews) reviews. • Succinct guidelines on archetypes generation derived from comprehen-sive research. Urban Building Energy Modelling (UBEM) is gaining traction as a method to inform city- or district-level decision making, including urban planning and retrofit subsidy allocation. Archetypes are commonly used in the modelling process as data templates to enrich geometry with thermophysical information, enabling energy simulation pipelines. Yet, archetypes generation is affected by data heterogeneity, methodological complexity, and compromises between accuracy and applicability. To investigate the current state of the field, this contribution carries out a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), and a case study review of two recent research projects in two European countries, Heuristic Urban Building Modelling for Life Cycle Assessments (HUB4LCA) and Urban Reference Buildings for Energy Modelling (URBEM). The findings on the availability of data and tools, common archetype scopes and studies’ aims, stakeholder involvement, and challenges are used to derive recommendations and a methodological framework for the process of archetypes generation. With local data availability and segmentation aims as the decisive influencing factors on methodology and objective, data scopes and relationships should be defined at an early stage, including the assessment of data source accessibility. Archetypes need to be both visualised for human readability, and published in simple data formats, including any data uncertainties, to promote their incorporation into various workflows and validation or calibration. Lastly, stakeholders of application fields such as urban planning and policymaking should be involved to streamline the development process. While the project review reflects issues seen in the literature, e.g., a lack of data, it showcases significant steps towards regional data refinement, and LCA using UBEM.