The activities in the residential building sector have high initial and follow-up expenditures, long life-cycles and require a large amount of materials and energy.
For instance, in 2007, for heating buildings 26.1% of the totally produced final energy was used in Germany. On the other hand, overall energy consumption in Serbian residential sector in the year 2010 represented almost 70% of electricity and heating consumption.

Considering that energy consumption achieved by heating of a building is directly related to its volume, construction year, type and usage, a virtual 3D city model containing all these parameters can be used for analyzing purposes. Energy Atlas - 3D city model is new methodology and software developed by scientist from TU Berlin. It can be used for decision-making on efficient investment strategies for retrofitting of existing buildings. Energy issues for buildings should be evaluated over life time of the building or at least over 30 years. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of building stock is essential in this case. Possibilities for linking Energy Atlas and Life Cycle Assessment into one holistic energy efficiency software gives further opportunities for applying life-cycle thinking into building and construction sector.
3D Energy Atlas Berlin, developers ensures us that this model can be easily transformed and implemented in other cities, since the data structure within other cities models is more or less identical.   

The above outline gave the motivation for this project and provide following hypothesis.

Is Energy Atlas an easily transferable model? Moreover, is this a start of a new publically available software that uses a 3D model for life-cycle approach to measure the impacts of existing buildings?

For answering this hypothesis, the city of Novi Sad in Serbia will be used as a case study and compared with the ongoing project in Berlin, Germany.