Life cycle environmental and cost evaluation of heating and hot water supply in social housing nZEBs

This paper presents a comparative analysis of different space heating and hot water systems for a social housing project in Santurtzi, Spain. The building, comprising 32 apartment units and currently under construction, has been designed to minimize thermal energy demand, while ensuring comfort and quality of the internal environment for the social housing occupiers. The selection of the heating and hot water energy systems has been carried considering a life cycle perspective both for environmental and economic impacts. Different alternatives have been analysed which compare conventional gas boiler installation, which has been the norm for this type of social housing for the last decades, with various options based on heat pump technology. Life cycle analysis of the environmental effects of electrification of the thermal energy demand through heat pumps show a potential for reducing life cycle CO2 emissions. The economic evaluation done through life cycle costing, comparing investment, maintenance, replacement and operational costs of gas boiler with aerothermal and geothermal heat pump solutions, have shown however that gas heating solutions are still the most competitive economically. Increasing the overall efficiency of those heating and hot water systems that include heat pump technology, while reducing their uncertainty in operation is a key element to ensure competitiveness of heat pumps in the current market.The work presented in this article is part of an analysis carried within AZEB project ‘Affordable Zero Energy Buildings’, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 754174

Information visualization for the taking of decisions

Vast amounts of useful information are accessible to us in multiple formats: from structured information in databases to organized documents. However, nobody is able to read this enormous quantity of information since we do not have enough time to do it. Computer hardware and software developments have encouraged the analysis of great amounts of information and they have also supported real-time, dynamic, interactive and visual representations. So we prefer graphs, charts, and maps to interpret this information and make decisions. Data Mining, Text Mining or Web Mining techniques would not be very useful for taking a decision if we could not take advantage from the graphs. The main advantage of these graphical presentations is that we could visualize a great amount of data in a very small amount of space and by using little time. The user can more rapidly explore the information. There is a strong relationship between the Mining and the information visualization. There is a need for collecting together the results to date, organizing them, understanding the essence of this field and providing materials for the scientific community. The purpose of this paper is clear: to help the structure of the field, and to suggest possible applications. We will explore some aspects as to how space is used in information visualization or how document collections can be transformed and visualized. We will point out how Data Mining results could serve Business Intelligence applications or Foresight techniques by the creation of scenarios.Peer reviewe