Optimized Energy and Comfort Management in Shared Smart Buildings
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Energy Sustainability".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2022) | Viewed by 3268
Special Issue Editor
Interests: applied thermodynamics; heat transfer; renewable energy; solar energy; geothermal energy; energy efficiency; energy systems optimization
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality and user comfort in buildings for public use have received increasing attention in recent years, as they contribute to reducing the consumption of conventional fuels and greenhouse gas emissions, which are fundamental targets in sustainability programs. Worldwide, increasing awareness of energy sustainability issues has been the main driver in developing the concepts of (nearly) zero energy buildings, where the reduced energy consumption is (nearly) fully covered by power locally generated from renewable sources. At the same time, recent advances in Internet of Things technologies are among the main enablers of smart homes and buildings (SB). The transition of conventional buildings into active environments that process, elaborate and react to online measured environmental quantities is being accelerated by aspects related to COVID-19, most notably in terms of the control of indoor air quality parameters and the monitoring of the density of occupants. Many solutions can be defined for maximizing energy efficiency and the comfort level perceived by occupants, mainly determined by three factors: thermal comfort, visual comfort and air quality.
Efficient building energy consumption and the maintenance of a high level of comfort is still a challenging task: various heterogeneous variables and parameters affect the problem. In general, the proposed framework for balancing energy consumption and occupants’ preferences by adapting building controls to users’ activities and requirements does not consider the direct interaction of the users. In a moder vision, people should be able to enter SBs and learn about basic environmental variables of the building, such as the indoor temperature, air quality (e.g., in terms of CO2 levels) and visual comfort, and they should be able to interact with the energy systems (e.g., the HVAC—heating, ventilation and air conditioning—system and lighting systems), to a certain allowed extent (e.g., for security reasons), combined with natural resources (day lighting, outside temperature, etc.).
Accordingly, in this Special Issue, we plan to consider contributions about current energy/environment management strategies for buildings of public use, considering energy efficiency solutions including active occupant interaction. Optimal real-time control strategies for active plants, such as HVAC systems or heat pumps, should be found through a multifaceted optimization problem that considers the different and possibly contrasting desires of people, together with energy consumption reduction in public buildings.
Prof. Dr. Alessandro Franco
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- energy efficiency
- occupant comfort
- multiobjective optimization
- sustainable buildings
- data clustering
- building dynamics
- information and communication technologies
- human interaction
