Cloud Solution for City Energy Analyst and Superurbana GmbH

The Problem

Most academic research prototypes fail because they are built for the launch, not for the maintenance. What began as a few lines of Python during my doctoral studies at ETH Zürich in 2013 had to avoid the graveyard of orphan code: it had to survive the hype cycle, reach global adoption, and sustain itself financially.

The Execution

We aimed to be first, with a ruthless focus on the long-term lifecycle of the product. Knowing that maintenance is where most innovation programmes die, the architecture and the community around the open-source platform were designed for sustainability from the start. And to solve the right problem we looked past the initial research sponsors to the urban planners and engineers downstream who would actually use the tool.

I led City Energy Analyst's evolution through ETH Zürich and the ETH-Singapore Centre, growing it from a personal research instrument into an open-source project with 40+ contributors across multiple countries. Commercial consultancy and CEA training across Europe and the Middle East funded the maintenance that research grants alone would never have covered, and the project was handed to the next generation of PhD researchers at ETH Zürich rather than left to decay.

The Result