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A Multi-Agent System for Building-Age Cohort Mapping to Support Urban Energy Planning

arXiv cs.CV / 3/19/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper proposes a multi-agent LLM system with three agents (Zensus, OSM, Monument) to fuse data from heterogeneous sources for building-age mapping to support urban energy planning.
  • A data orchestrator and harmonizer geocodes and deduplicates building imprints to produce a fused ground truth used for downstream analysis.
  • It introduces BuildingAgeCNN, a satellite-only classifier based on a ConvNeXt backbone with a Feature Pyramid Network, CoordConv spatial channels, and SE blocks, achieving 90.69% overall accuracy but a macro-F1 of 67.25% due to class imbalance and confusions between adjacent cohorts.
  • The address-to-prediction pipeline includes calibrated confidence estimates and flags low-confidence cases for manual review to mitigate planning risks.
  • The system is designed to help energy demand planners optimize district-heating networks and deployment of low-carbon energy systems.

Abstract

Determining the age distribution of the urban building stock is crucial for sustainable municipal heat planning and upgrade prioritization. However, existing approaches often rely on datasets gathered via sensors or remote sensing techniques, leaving inconsistencies and gaps in data. We present a multi-agent LLM system comprising three key agents, the Zensus agent, the OSM agent, and the Monument agent, that fuse data from heterogeneous sources. A data orchestrator and harmonizer geocodes and deduplicates building imprints. Using this fused ground truth, we introduce BuildingAgeCNN, a satellite-only classifier based on a ConvNeXt backbone augmented with a Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), CoordConv spatial channels, and Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) blocks. Under spatial cross validation, BuildingAgeCNN attains an overall accuracy of 90.69% but a modest macro-F1 of 67.25%, reflecting strong class imbalance and persistent confusions between adjacent historical cohorts. To mitigate risk for planning applications, the address-to prediction pipeline includes calibrated confidence estimates and flags low-confidence cases for manual review. This multi-agent LLM system not only assists in gathering structured data but also helps energy demand planners optimize district-heating networks and target low-carbon sustainable energy systems.