Title: UrbanGraph: Physics-Informed Spatio-Temporal Dynamic Heterogeneous Graphs for Urban Microclimate Prediction
Primary area: applications to physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)
Keywords: Spatio-Temporal Graph, Heterogeneous Graph, Dynamic Graph, Physics-Informed ML, Urban Microclimate

Abstract: 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 R² 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.