UrbanGraph: Physics-Informed Spatio-Temporal Dynamic Heterogeneous Graphs for Urban Microclimate Prediction
This addresses urban microclimate prediction for building energy and public health applications, representing a domain-specific advancement with some incremental elements.
The paper tackles urban microclimate prediction by introducing UrbanGraph, a physics-informed framework that integrates heterogeneous and dynamic spatio-temporal graphs, resulting in improvements of up to 10.8% in R² and 17.0% reduction in FLOPs over baselines.
With rapid urbanization, predicting urban microclimates has become critical, as it affects building energy demand and public health risks. However, existing generative and homogeneous graph approaches fall short in capturing physical consistency, spatial dependencies, and temporal variability. To address this, we introduce UrbanGraph, a physics-informed framework integrating heterogeneous and dynamic spatio-temporal graphs. It encodes key physical processes -- vegetation evapotranspiration, shading, and convective diffusion -- while modeling complex spatial dependencies among diverse urban entities and their temporal evolution. We evaluate UrbanGraph on UMC4/12, a physics-based simulation dataset covering diverse urban configurations and climates. Results show that UrbanGraph improves $R^2$ by up to 10.8% and reduces FLOPs by 17.0% over all baselines, with heterogeneous and dynamic graphs contributing 3.5% and 7.1% gains. Our dataset provides the first high-resolution benchmark for spatio-temporal microclimate modeling, and our method extends to broader urban heterogeneous dynamic computing tasks.