PNNL

Abstract

Measuring and tracking building energy use and other data is essential for cities, utilities, and service providers. Currently, buildings are conceived as “destinations” and therefore are identified with street addresses or with a single geographic coordinate point (latitude and longitude). However, the address-based system is insufficient to uniquely identify buildings, and to append and join data from disparate sources due to address name duplicates, incorrect entries, and lack of an input format standard. Other industries have implemented unique identifiers to handle the increasing amount of data that is appended to those identifiers. Similarly, we developed Unique Building Identifier (UBID) to act as an external common key between databases and facilitate data mapping. Our methodology converts a building footprint into a unique identifier based on a grid reference system. The developed ruleset ensures that individual implementers can reach the same conclusion utilizing publicly available digital maps. We generated UBIDs for all buildings in three major US cities (San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City) and performed statistical analysis to verify the uniqueness and effectiveness of the proposed unique identifier.