Energy Management and Optimization in Smart Cities and Smart Factories

Dear Colleagues,

This Topic examines convergent intelligent systems for city–factory energy management, with an emphasis on digital twins that fuse real-time telemetry from distributed energy resources, storage, electric mobility, and industrial loads with physics-based and data-driven simulations to support operational decision-making. Advances in big data analytics, cloud computing, smart grids and microgrids, cyber–physical systems, the Internet of Things, edge AI, and interoperable standards enable cities and factories to be treated as interconnected socio-technical energy infrastructures rather than isolated domains. Integration is realized across supply, demand, and flexibility services: grid carbon-intensity signals coordinate with factory microgrids, on-site photovoltaics, battery energy storage, combined heat and power, and flexible process loads to minimize cost, peaks, and emissions; urban traffic intelligence and EV fleet status inform charging and scheduling for logistics hubs and on-site autonomous mobile robots and automated guided vehicles; energy, water, and air-quality sensing align with thermal and electrical co-optimization, process-water reuse, and emissions monitoring; municipal emergency response interfaces with predictive maintenance of energy assets to increase resilience and reduce downtime; and city-level training resources reinforce human-in-the-loop supervisory control, skill-aware scheduling, energy policy, and energy literacy on the shop floor.

Within this framework, digital twins support multi-time-scale optimization and control, including day-ahead and intraday scheduling, model predictive control for microgrids, and learning-based coordination of flexibility while preserving safety and power quality constraints. Interoperability across urban and industrial systems is achieved through semantic and syntactic bridges that link utility, building, and plant information models, while cybersecurity protects end-to-end energy data and actuation. In addition, education ecosystems spanning vocational programs, higher education, and continuous reskilling are essential to sustain performance, accelerate technology adoption, and realize measurable gains in efficiency, resilience, and sustainability across city and factory energy systems.

Prof. Dr. Pedro Ponce-Cruz
Dr. Brian Anthony
Dr. Erick Guadalupe Ramirez-Cedillo
Prof. Dr. Edgar Omar Lopez-Caudana
Dr. Juana Isabel Méndez
Topic Editors