Sustainability and Energy Efficiency of the Built Environment: from the Single Building to the District Scale

A special issue of Buildings (ISSN 2075-5309). This special issue belongs to the section "Building Energy, Physics, Environment, and Systems".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2019) | Viewed by 11440

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Energy, Information Engineering and Mathematical Models; University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze Ed.9, 90128 - PALERMO, Italy
Interests: life cycle assessment; eco-design; net zero energy buildings; environmental sustainability; energy policy; sustainable buildings; circular economy
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Guest Editor
EU Project Manager – Facility Management Expert
Interests: sustainability, buildings, BIM and innovation

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainability targets and climate change objectives cannot be met without addressing buildings and the built environment at a building, district, and urban scale, to include our transport and energy infrastructures. The annual Sustainable Places conference involves technical contributions with respect to designing, building, and retrofitting the places we live and work in a more sustainable way. SP2019, the seventh edition of the conference is happy to announce its third Special Issue of the Buildings journal to highlight selected works from the conference.

Dr. Francesco Guarino
Prof. Sonia Longo
Dr. Giulia Carbonari
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Island Sustainability
  • Investing in EE Retrofit
  • Demand Response
  • Smart Cities
  • Sustainability Protocols
  • Energy efficiency in buildings
  • Smart grids and demand response
  • Renewable energy technologies
  • Energy storage 
  • District heating and cooling
  • Nature based solutions
  • Circularity
  • Digitalization and technologies to reduce the energy performance gap

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

19 pages, 3069 KiB  
Article
Short-Term Prediction of Energy Consumption in Demand Response for Blocks of Buildings: DR-BoB Approach
by Nashwan Dawood
Buildings 2019, 9(10), 221; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings9100221 - 18 Oct 2019
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 3801
Abstract
Load forecasting plays a major role in determining the prices of the energy supplied to end customers. An accurate prediction is vital for the energy companies, especially when it comes to the baseline calculations that are used to predict the energy load. In [...] Read more.
Load forecasting plays a major role in determining the prices of the energy supplied to end customers. An accurate prediction is vital for the energy companies, especially when it comes to the baseline calculations that are used to predict the energy load. In this paper, an accurate short-term prediction using the Exponentially Weighted Extended Recursive Least Square (EWE-RLS) algorithm based upon a standard Kalman filter is implemented to predict the energy load for blocks of buildings in a large-scale for four different European pilot sites. A new software tool, namely Local Energy Manager (LEM), is developed to implement the RLS algorithm and predict the forecast for energy demand a day ahead with a regular meter frequency of a quarter of an hour. The EWE-RLS algorithm is used to develop the LEM in demand response for blocks of buildings (DR-BOB), this is part of a large-scale H2020 EU project with the aim to generate the energy baselines during and after running demand response (DR) events. This is achieved in order to evaluate and measure the energy reduction as compared with historical data to demonstrate the environmental and economic benefits of DR. The energy baselines are generated based on different market scenarios, different temperature, and energy meter files with three different levels of asset, building, and a whole pilot site level. The prediction results obtained from the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) offer a 5.1% high degree of accuracy and stability at a UK pilot site level compared to the asset and whole building scenarios, where it shows a very acceptable prediction accuracy of 10.7% and 19.6% respectively. Full article
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17 pages, 1431 KiB  
Article
BIM4Ren: Barriers to BIM Implementation in Renovation Processes in the Italian Market
by Mohamed Elagiry, Valentina Marino, Natalia Lasarte, Peru Elguezabal and Thomas Messervey
Buildings 2019, 9(9), 200; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings9090200 - 30 Aug 2019
Cited by 23 | Viewed by 6530
Abstract
As a part of BIM4REN (Building Information Modelling based tools & technologies for fast and efficient RENovation of residential buildings) H2020 project, an analysis of the barriers of the renovation process, the potential of digitalization to overcome those barriers, and the requirements to [...] Read more.
As a part of BIM4REN (Building Information Modelling based tools & technologies for fast and efficient RENovation of residential buildings) H2020 project, an analysis of the barriers of the renovation process, the potential of digitalization to overcome those barriers, and the requirements to ensure a successful digital workflow. This paper focuses on the Italian market where surveys, interviews, and a workshop were conducted, and then a diagnosis was made on the results obtained. Results show that technological innovation on BIM tools cannot be a stand-alone action to reach a full digitalization of the renovation sector, but it shall be supported by a major awareness of the actors involved, improved skills, and competences, as well as an important change of approach in the current construction practice. Full article
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