IoT software infrastructure for Energy Management and Simulation in Smart Cities

This paper presents an IoT software infrastructure that enables energy management and simulation of new control policies in a city district. The proposed platform enables the interoperability and the correlation of (near-)real-time building energy profiles with environmental data from sensors as well as building and grid models. In a smart city context, this platform fulfills i) the integration of heterogeneous data sources at building and district level, and ii) the simulation of novel energy policies at district level aimed at the optimization of the energy usage accounting also for its impact on building comfort. The platform has been deployed in a real world district and a novel control policy for the heating distribution network has been developed and tested. Results are presented and discussed in the paper

Energy Systems Integration: from building scale to urban scale

The research activity presented in this thesis focuses on the heating energy demand assessment of a small urban district with buildings connected to the local District Heating Network (DHN). The main goal of the work consisted in determining effective actions that could be applied on both the heating system and on the envelope of five case study buildings in order to reduce the morning peak of the heating system and reduce also the overall energy demand for space heating. The outcomes of this research may be useful to assess the impact of the proposed improvements on the operation of a urban district heating network. A further goal of the work carried out was to develop an Artificial Neural Network useful to forecast, at short term, the indoor temperature of rooms once the weather conditions and the thermal energy supplied by the District Heating Network are known

From the architectural model to the energy model: the use of BIM for the evaluation of the energy performance of buildings

Since about a decade the European policies are impelling researchers to find solutions to reduce the energy demand of buildings, for both new constructions and renovations. The first step towards energy consumption reduction is to carry out a reliable energy performance analysis of the building envelope. At present, the Italian professionals are required to assess the energy demands of buildings according to the quasi-steady state method specified in the Italian Technical Specification UNI/TS 11300-1:2008 that follows the UNI EN ISO 13790:2008. The paper aims to investigate the common professional practice in the assessment of the energy performance of an existing building. Thus, this study analyses a real building block situated in Turin (Italy) and develops a 3D parametric architectural model and an energy model by means of an Italian certified commercial software, commonly used for energy diagnosis and certificates. This paper highlights the importance of the interoperability between the 3D parametric model and the energy model in speeding up the acquisition of precise data and making the work of a professional more accurate and more cost-effective. In particular, the paper focuses on the impact of the projections, due to the geometry of the building, on the energy demands for heating and cooling

Combining BIM, GIS, and IoT to Foster Energy Management and Simulation in Smart Cities

This chapter presents a novel distributed software infrastructure to enable energy management and simulation of novel control strategies in smart cities. In this context, the following heterogeneous information, describing the different entities in a city, needs to be taken into account to form a unified district information model: internet-of-things (IoT) devices, building information model, system information model, and georeferenced information system. IoT devices are crucial to monitor in (near-) real-time both building energy trends and environmental data. Thus, the proposed solution fulfills the integration and interoperability of such data sources providing also a correlation among them. Such correlation is the key feature to unlock management and simulation of novel energy policies aimed at optimizing the energy usage accounting also for its impact on building comfort. The platform has been deployed in a real-world district and a novel control policy for the heating distribution network has been developed and tested. Finally, experimental results are presented and discusse