Sustainable Development in the Smart Built Environment

Dear Colleagues,

You are warmly invited to submit a paper to this Special Issue titled “Sustainable Development in the Smart Built Environment”. The emergence of the smart built environment (SBE), with integrated smart technologies, has revolutionised the construction industry in many areas, including in the design, engineering, construction, performance, security, and use. Intelligent buildings, Internet of Things, smart envelops, smart meters, and smart materials are only some of the terms that are being increasingly used in the construction industry. The role and the benefits of the smart technologies in SBE are undeniable; however, smart cities and smart buildings are ultimately about the people who live in them. The smart technologies have indeed provided opportunities to improve users’ experience by improving the interactions between buildings and their occupants. They help to better monitor, understand, and guide the occupants’ behaviours in a systematic approach, contributing to reducing the gaps between the predicted and actual performances of buildings. Smart technologies have also been successfully applied to deliver integrated retrofitted solutions in a practical and user-friendly manner in order to address existing issues, such as energy performance and indoor air quality, aiming to improve the comfort, health, and wellbeing of the occupants. Likewise, the digitalisation of design and construction, along with building information modelling (BIM) and Geographic Information System (GIS), have provided new platforms for an enhanced flow of information, which could in turn improve construction processes while reducing costs and environmental impacts. BIM models, with the assistance of the smart monitoring and controlling technologies, could feed into the building management systems (BMS) to design intelligent buildings that could simultaneously address occupants’ health and comfort, while reducing operational energy and environmental impacts. To this end, this Special Issue aims to provide a platform where the emerging smart technologies and their effects on the sustainable development of the smart built environment could be discussed.

Dr. Arman Hashemi
Guest Editor

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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

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 semimonthly 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.