Building, District, and Community Energy Systems Optimization

Dear Colleagues,

We invite submissions to a Special Issue of the journal Energies on the topic of Building and District Energy System Optimization.

Buildings account for a major share of energy consumption in today’s highly urbanized societies. Reducing carbon emissions and enhancing energy security have provoked increasing interest in energy conservation, energy efficiency, and renewable energy technologies. At the building scale, the attention has been on passive strategies, including emerging building insulation technologies, natural lighting, heating and cooling, as well as energy storage and recovery. Active strategies such as building-integrated renewables have also been pursued to opt for clean sources in the absense of conservation and efficiency measures. In doing so, to improve the economy of scale when it comes to promoting passive or active strategies in buildings, district heating and cooling systems are designed and configured to connect several buildings with a collective generation, distribution, and control mechanism to achieve the most energy-efficient performance.

The design, operation, and control of energy systems at the building or district scale is a complex task involving many decisions related to the choice of technologies, sizing, configuration, scheduling, maintenance, and occupants’ preferences. The purpose of this Special Issue is to try to fill the knowledge gap that presently exists on the use of optimization models to adress these decisions in an integrated manner. We invite original contributions regarding recent developments and novel ideas in applications of whole system models and optimization techniques. Potential topics include but are not limited to design and operation of mechanical systems for energy conversion, distribution, and storage; building refurbishment decisions; renewable energy integration in buildings; combined heat and power systems, control systems (real-time and predictive); energy recovery; environmentally-frienly designs, fault disgnostics, and maintenance management; and emerging applications of data analytics and machine learning in building and district energy systems.      

Prof. Dr. Fuzhan Nasiri
Dr. Mohammad Sameti
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. Energies 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.