Monjur Mourshed

• Professor
• Professor at Cardiff University

Building height is a key geometric attribute for generating 3-D building models. We propose a novel four-stage approach for automated estimation of building heights from their shadows in very high resolution (VHR) multispectral images. First, a building's actual shadow regions are detected by applying ratio-band algorithm to the VHR image. Second,...

Understanding the climate and location aspects are usually the first step in energy applications - from buildings to renewable energy. With so many of the renewable energy sources being significantly dependent on weather, it is essential that the temporal and geospatial variability and distribution of climatic design parameters are investigated for...

Buildings are responsible for 40% of global energy use and contribute towards 30% of the total CO2 emissions. The drive to reduce energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions from buildings has acted as a catalyst in the development of advanced computational methods for energy efficient design, management and control of buildings and systems....

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is a fast growing megacity with a population of 12.8 million. Due to its tropical location, dense urban morphology and higher than average density of population, buildings in Dhaka are likely to be adversely affected by the projected changes in climate, in particular by the increases in temperature. Buildings play...

Research indicates that staff wellbeing, productivity and satisfaction are linked with a hospital's physical environment, in particular the aspects that are determined during early design stages of a building's lifecycle. Incorporating healthcare providers' perspectives during the design of a facility is, therefore, essential to create an effective...

Turkey (Türkiye) aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2053, yet remains heavily reliant on fossil fuel imports, accounting for more than 70% of its total energy use. The energy sector is also the largest contributor to national greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for 71.8% of the total in 2022. Renewables comprised 59.4% of installed capacity by...

Qatar has experienced a remarkable surge in all four components of gross domestic product (GDP)—consumption, government spending, investment, and net exports as well as significant growth in population over the past thirty years. Despite a potential link between increasing production and consumption and a corresponding rise in CO2 emissions in Qata...

Weather information plays a critical role in energy applications-from designing and planning to the management and maintenance of building energy systems, renewable energy applications, and smart utility grids. This research examines weather and climate data for energy applications, covering their sources, generation, implementation, and forecastin...

Building stock modelling often employs clustering techniques on the segmented stock data to identify representative archetypes, enabling cost-effective analyses while retaining the diversity and characteristics of the overall stock. However, the effectiveness of these archetypes in representing the original stock attributes remains under-explored,...

As Bangladesh strives to transition from a least developed to a developed nation by 2041, a growing population and rising disposable income have spurred a growing middle class, escalating the demand for accessible energy. The government and the private sector have heavily invested in a fossil fuel-centric energy mix to meet this anticipated surge i...

The domestic sector is a significant energy consumer-accounting for around 40% of global electricity demand–due to household demand diversity and complexity. An accurate and robust estimation of domestic electrical loads, environmental impacts, and energy-efficiency potential is crucial for optimal planning and management of energy systems and appl...

Anthropogenic climate change will likely put dwellings at risk of overheating and potentially increase cooling demand in the decades ahead, leading to higher greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions due to the energy consumed for mechanical cooling. Contemporary constructions with highly insulated fabric have been found to suffer from periodic overheating in...

Buildings are responsible for one-third of the UK's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The move to reduce emissions has resulted in recent stringent building regulations primarily aimed at reducing heating and associated energy use, often by improving the building fabric's airtightness. However, internal gains dominated, highly–insulated and airtight...

Bangladesh—recently graduated to developing nation category from a least developed country with an emerging economy also is one of the severely affected countries by climate change—is heading towards a coal-intensive electricity generation mix contrary to global decarbonisation efforts. It is facing formidable challenges in achieving universal acce...

An accurate district electricity load is crucial to ensure the optimal design and operation of Distributed Energy System (DES). Therefore, a bottom-up physics-based model of district-level thermal and electrical energy demand was developed in this research for estimating sub-hourly energy demand of buildings at a community/district level to support...

European Union households account for 26% of the final energy consumption, yet their participation in demand response (DR) schemes is virtually non-existent. Relatively small amounts of flexibility primarily from appliances and the lack of DR-enabled energy management solutions in homes have been identified as the main barriers. As part of a Horizo...

To improve the prediction accuracy of heating demand, an appropriate base temperature should be estimated before using the heating degree-days (HDD) approach. This study collected the measured data for gas consumption at half-hourly resolution and the building physical characteristics from 89 educational buildings over four years. To determine the...

In this paper, we present a novel approach developed through the TABEDE project to scale demand response across all building types. To this end, we propose an intelligent infrastructure that enables buildings to follow various demand-response schemes, that optimises the electricity consumption and generation of the buildings to reduce energy cost a...

Extreme weather events due to climate change and growing economic and development activities along coastlines have resulted in increased risks from natural and human-induced disasters—affecting the safety and livelihoods of coastal communities. Assessing community resilience to disasters is, therefore, an essential step toward mitigating their curr...

Solar power is an important renewable energy resource and acts as a major contributor to replacing fossil fuel generators and reducing carbon emissions. However, the intermittent power output due to the uncertain solar irradiance significantly challenges the economic integrations of solar generation within the existing power system, which calls for...

Mean regression analysis may not capture associations that occur primarily in the tails of the outcome distribution. In this study, we focused on multiple weather factors to find the extent to which they impact heating-related gas consumption at higher quantiles. We used change-point multivariable quantile regression models to investigate distribut...

Decreasing initial costs, the increased availability of charging infrastructure and favorable policy measures have resulted in the recent surge in plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) ownerships. PEV adoption increases electricity consumption from the grid that could either exacerbate electricity supply shortages or smooth demand curves. The optimal coor...

Load forecasting is one of the major challenges of power system operation and is crucial to the effective scheduling for economic dispatch at multiple time scales. Numerous load forecasting methods have been proposed for household and commercial demand, as well as for loads at various nodes in a power grid. However, compared with conventional loads...

The past decade has seen the development of new means of production and distribution as well as more efficient appliances and materials that limit consumption. The variety of technical solutions has increased dramatically making decision more complex when it comes to energy systems implementation. This paper presents the ongoing research on the dev...

The consideration of local contexts in urban sustainability assessment is important for developing countries because of their varying needs and priorities. Using Iraq as a case study, a stakeholder-driven structured methodology is presented which identifies and ranks context-relevant indicators and assigns weights for aggregating indicator scores b...

Predictive analytics play a significant role in ensuring optimal and secure operation of power systems, reducing energy consumption, detecting fault and diagnosis, and improving grid resilience. However, due to system nonlinearities, delay, and complexity of the problem because of many influencing factors (e.g., climate, occupants’ behaviour, occup...

The variability of renewable energy resources, due to the characteristic weather fluctuations, introduces uncertainty in generation output that are greater than the conventional energy reserves the grid uses to deal with the relatively predictable uncertainties in demand. The high variability of renewable generation makes forecasting critical for o...

The UK Government is committed to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 80% by 2050. Buildings are responsible for 37% of the total GHG emissions in the UK and the need to reduce their emissions has resulted in more stringent building regulations in the recent past. The regulations, energy rating systems and voluntary guidelines — all are prim...

The UK Government is committed to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 80% by 2050. Buildings are responsible for 37% of the total GHG emissions in the UK and the need to reduce their emissions has resulted in more stringent building regulations in the recent past. The regulations, energy rating systems and voluntary guidelines — all are prim...

Passive cooling via natural ventilation through window openings is a low-carbon strategy to minimize cooling demand and to adapt to the rising ambient temperatures due to climate change. However, relying on the manual control of windows by occupants is not always optimal for maintaining indoor thermal comfort. In this study, a model-based approach...

In this paper, we look at the key forecasting algorithms and optimization strategies for the building energy management and demand response management. By conducting a combined and critical review of forecast learning algorithms and optimization models/algorithms, current research gaps and future research directions and potential technical routes a...

This paper presents a smart energy management system for unlocking demand response in the UK residential sector. The approach comprises the estimation of one-hour energy demand and PV generation (supply) for scheduling the 24-h ahead demand profiles by shifting potential flexible loads. Real-time electrical demand is met by combining power supplies...

This study is aimed at assessing the impact of the insulation refurbishment of the English housing stock on the embodied energy needed for the various refurbishment scenarios and their corresponding operational energy use reductions. An embodied energy model comprising 22 million homes has been constructed, enabling the assessment and comparison of...

The Mas2tering and DRIvE European projects develop a software platform to manage the residential and tertiary energy flexibility in local communities of prosumers. This platform includes forecasting, optimization, cybersecurity and fast-response capabilities modules. Business models and use cases were developed, taking into account the regulatory c...

In this paper we address the challenges that impede collective adaptation in smart mobility systems by proposing a notion of ensembles. Ensembles enable systems with collective adaptability to be built as emergent aggregations of autonomous and self-adaptive agents. Adaptation in these systems is triggered by a run-time occurrence, which is known a...

Building energy consumption patterns are primarily affected by building function, operation, occupancy and thermal characteristics. A robust method of energy use pattern recognition is, therefore, essential. Heating degree-days (HDD) are routinely used for heating energy consumption prediction and analytics, the accuracy of which depends on how wel...

In the version of this Review originally published, in Table 3 seven entries in the columns ‘Developer’ and ‘Country of origin’ were incorrect and should have read as shown below; these errors have now been corrected. All other entries in the Table are unaffected.

Energy planning models (EPMs) play an indispensable role in policy formulation and energy sector development. The forecasting of energy demand and supply is at the heart of an EPM. Different forecasting methods, from statistical to machine learning have been applied in the past. The selection of a forecasting method is mostly based on data availabi...

Emerging economies with rapidly growing population and energy demand, own some of the most expensive power plants in the world. We hypothesized that corruption has a relationship with the capital cost of power plants in developing countries such as Bangladesh. For this study, we analyzed the capital cost of 61 operational and planned power plants i...

Energy planning models (EPMs) support multi-criteria assessments of the impact of energy policies on the economy and environment. Most EPMs originated in developed countries and are primarily aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions while enhancing energy security. In contrast, most, if not all, developing countries are predominantly concerned wi...

Construction projects involve multi-disciplinary and multi-actor collaborations that generate massive amounts of data over their lifecycle. Data are often sensitive and embody rights, ownership and intellectual property of the creator. Managing project information raises concerns about security, inconsistency and loss of data. The conventional appr...

There is a growing interest among healthcare managers and designers in moving towards a 'patient-centred' design of health and care facilities by integrating patient perceptions and expectations of the physical environment where care takes place. Increased interests in physical environments can mostly be attributed to our improved understanding of...

This study presents an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based district level smart grid forecasting framework for predicting both aggregated and disaggregated electricity demand from consumers, developed for use in a low-voltage smart electricity grid. To generate the proposed framework, several experimental study have been conducted to determine th...

A deeper understanding of building performance is essential to reduce their energy consumption and corresponding greenhouse gas emissions. Heating degree-days (HDD) encapsulates the severity and duration of cold weather, which is routinely used for weather related analysis of fuel consumption, performance benchmarking, and compliance. The accuracy...

Electricity forecasting is an essential component of smart grid, which has attracted increasing academic interest. Forecasting enables informed and efficient responses for electricity demand. However, various forecasting models exist making it difficult for inexperienced researchers to make an informed model selection. This paper presents a systema...

This study presents a model for district-level electricity demand forecasting using a set of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) (parallel ANNs) based on current energy loads and social parameters such as occupancy. A comprehensive sensitivity analysis is conducted to select the inputs of the ANN by considering external weather conditions, occupancy...

Energy prediction models are used in buildings as a performance evaluation engine in advanced control and optimisation, and in making informed decisions by facility managers and utilities for enhanced energy efficiency. Simplified and data-driven models are often the preferred option where pertinent information for detailed simulation are not avail...

Developing countries face significant urban environmental challenges due to rapid urbanization, population growth, inability to effectively tackle climate and environmental risks, inefficient governance and environmental management, the prevalence of corruption and a chronic shortage of investment. Environmental degradation is often acute in politi...

With increasing complexity of construction projects, a collaborative environment becomes essential to ensure effective communication during the project lifecycle. Conventional team collaboration raises issues such as the lack of trust; uncertainties regarding ownership and Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs); miscommunication; and cultural differen...

Predicting energy consumption and daylight illumi-nance plays an important part in building lighting control strategies. The use of simplified or data-driven methods is often preferred where a fast response is needed e.g. as a performance evaluation engine for advanced real-time control and optimization applications. In this paper we developed and...

It is essential to monitor urban evolution at spatial and temporal scales to improve our understanding of the changes in cities and their impact on natural resources and environmental systems. Various aspects of remote sensing are routinely used to detect and map features and changes on land and sea surfaces, and in the atmosphere that affect urban...

Buildings account for 40% of total global energy use and contribute towards 30% of total CO2 emissions. Heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are the major sources of energy consumption in buildings, and there has been extensive research focusing on efficiently control them. However, in most cases, this is achieved at the cost of...

Cities are engines of economic prosperity and social development. Rapid urbanization and the impacts of climate change have resulted in increased vulnerabilities in cities. On the other hand, the increasing proliferation of connected devices and distributed monitoring of the environment around us has opened up an opportunity to transform the way we...

This study presents the anonymization of consumer data in a district-level smart grid using the k-anonymity approach. The data utilized in this study covers the demographic information and associated energy consumption of consumers. The anonymization process is implemented at the prosumer level, considering their importance in sharing flexibility a...

Power distribution network management must integrate with demand side management, alongside distributed energy resources, in order to meet sustainability, resilience, and economic challenges through a smart grid approach. This paper presents an implementation of the Universal Smart Energy Framework (USEF) through a multiagent system and a novel sem...

Recent work has attempted to deliver optimized distributed energy resource management, including the use of demand side management through smart homes. This aims to reduce power transmission losses, increase the generation share of renewable energy sources and create new markets through peak shaving and flexibility markets. Further, this leverages...

This paper presents the ongoing research on the development of a total life cycle and near real time environmental assessment. Over 30 widely used sustainability assessment tools have been reviewed. This is done through investigating different characteristics of each tools namely: locality, scale, life cycle stage implementation, chosen criteria, c...

Due to rapid urbanization, more than half of the world's population now live in cities. By the year 2050, the urbanized population will increase to two–thirds of the global population, which prompted increased international attention to identifying environmental, social and economic challenges of urban development encompassing diverse aspects such...

Cloud technologies are considerably utilised in BIM research and development, with the majority of research areas targeting the facilitation of team collaboration. One major hurdle for BIM adoption are issues resulted from team collaboration e.g. data loss, ownership and legal disputes. However, an argument has been put forward to utilise cloud-bas...

Data sharing and exchange during construction project's lifecycle among multiple actors within different collaborative disciplines remain a complicated, and mainly unresolved issue, due to the dynamics and fragmented nature of the construction industry. The fragmentation among software tools and actors results in several crucial collaboration issue...

Solar home systems (SHS) are seen as an attractive option for off-grid electrification in rural areas in developing countries. The combined effect of declining photovoltaic module costs and success in micro-finance has resulted in increased SHS installations in emerging economies in Asia such as Bangladesh. Majority of the SHS components are now ma...

One of the challenges of the ageing population in many countries is the efficient delivery of health and care services, which is further complicated by the increase in neurological conditions among the elderly due to rising life expectancy. Personal care of the elderly is of concern to their relatives, in case they are alone in their homes and unfo...

Buildings are responsible for 40% of global energy use and contribute towards 30% of the total CO2 emissions. The drive to reduce energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions from buildings has acted as a catalyst in the increasing installation of meters and sensors for monitoring energy use and indoor environmental conditions in buil...

Smart scheduling of energy consuming devices in the domestic sector should factor in clean energy generation potential, electricity tariffs, and occupants' behaviour (i.e., interactions with their appliances). The paper presents an Artificial Neural Network/Genetic Algorithm (ANN-GA) smart appliance scheduling approach for optimised energy manageme...

The geometric visualisation of the buildings as the 3D solid structures can provide a comprehensive vision in terms of the assessment and simulation of solar exposed surfaces, which includes rooftops and facades. However, the main issue in the simulation a genuine data source that presents the real characteristics of buildings. This research aims t...

The geometric visualisation of the buildings as the 3D solid structures can provide a comprehensive vision in terms of the assessment and simulation of solar exposed surfaces, which includes rooftops and facades. However, the main issue in the simulation a genuine data source that presents the real characteristics of buildings. This research aims t...

Artificial lighting can increase a energy consumption. On the other hand, the availability of daylight in occupied spaces can reduce energy consumption while positively contributing to occupant wellbeing. However, daylight entering the space through windows needs to be reconciled with heat loss during winter and heat gain during summer, which may a...

Utilization of cloud technologies has recently attained a profile in building information modeling (BIM). Many studies have investigated the potential role of cloud in facilitating the use of BIM in the construction domain. In addition, recent studies have focused on the role of cloud in facilitating team collaboration across a building’s lifecycle...

Cities are responsible for the depletion of natural resources and agricultural lands, and 70% of global CO2 emissions. There are significant risks to cities fromthe impacts of climate change in addition to existing vulnerabilities, primarily because of rapid urbanization. Urban design and development are generally considered as the instrument to sh...

The entire electricity infrastructure and associated socio-technical system including transmission and distribution networks, the system operator, suppliers, generators, consumers and market mechanisms will need to evolve to realize the full potential of smart-grids. At the heart of this evolution is the integration of information and communication...

Bangladesh, the eighth largest populous country in the world, has a significant rural population (70%), which is contributing to the energy demand of the country. The major portion in energy demand of rural households is biomass energy. With the improvement in GDP the rural energy demand would switch to more electricity intensive demand pathway. Th...

Buildings are responsible for half of UK's energy use and carbon emissions, the reduction of which is key to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Most of the energy used in UK buildings is for heating and lighting, the need for which is determined, to a large extent, by building form and envelope, and the thermal properties of construction. Glaz...

Very-High-Resolution (VHR) satellite imagery is a powerful source of data for detecting and extracting information about urban constructions. Shadow in the VHR satellite imageries provides vital information on urban construction forms, illumination direction, and the spatial distribution of the objects that can help to further understanding of the...

Cities are responsible for 70% of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the depletion of agricultural land and natural resources. The sustainable urban design can achieve the required balance, in addition to measuring convergence with sustainable development and the possibility of dealing with long term urban problems. It also encourages community p...

Construction projects have become very complex - comprising varying activities and processes, and requiring inputs from a wide range of disciplines, especially in the adoption of Building Information Modelling (BIM) technologies. Dealing with such matters has raised several issues, such as data inconsistency, different data versions, and data loss....

Nowadays thermal, environmental performance of buildings and systems are investigated mainly through building simulation software. The prediction of the building performance requires an updated long-term weather database by the generation of a comprehensive database, so-called Typical Meteorological Year (TMY). However, the majority of methods and...

Preventing airborne infections during a surgical procedure is of paramount importance for effective and economical delivery of care, as well as for health and well-being of patients. Ultra clean ventilation (UCV) systems are commonly used in operating theatres, in particular for orthopaedic surgery because of the higher risk of infection from expos...

There is a widespread interest in reducing environmental impacts of all industries and processes to help achieve the targets set in the Climate Change Act of 2008. The use of alternative construction techniques to build the walls of UK housing has the potential to reduce their environmental impact in a range of ways. This includes the reduction of...

This paper describes the multi-objective optimized design of fenestration that is based on the facade of the building being divided into a number of small regularly spaced cells. The minimization of energy use and capital cost by a multi-objective genetic algorithm was investigated for: two alternative problem encodings (bit-string and integer); th...

Recent climate change projections estimate that the average summertime temperature in the southern part of Great Britain may increase by up to 5.4°C by the end of the century. The general consensus is that projected increases in temperature will render British dwellings vulnerable to summer overheating and by the middle of this century it may becom...

The interdependence and feedback between climate impacts mitigation and adaptation to the inevitable changes in climate are the key challenges for the built environment in the coming decades. These challenges are more pronounced in the interface between science and society, in which scientific knowledge and evidence are transformed into policy acti...

Degree-days are a versatile climatic indicator and used for many applications in the design and operation of en- ergy efficient buildings – from the estimation of energy consumption and carbon emissions due to space heating and cooling to the energy and environmental monitoring of buildings. This research is aimed at developing an equation for calc...

Aims: Research suggests that specialised lighting design is essential to cater for the elderly users of a building because of reduced visual performance with increased age. This review aims to document what is known of the physical and psychological aspects of lighting and their role in promoting a healthy and safe environment for the elderly. Me...

Several studies have found an association between the physical environment and human health and wellbeing that resulted in the postulation of the idea of evidence-based and patient-centred design of healthcare facilities. The key challenge is that most of the underpinning research for the evidence base is context specific, the use of which in build...