A Decision Support Framework for Smart Cities Energy Assessment and Optimization

Cities are becoming more and more of a focal point for our economies and societies, particularly because of the on-going urbanization, and the trend towards increasingly knowledge intensive economies as well as their growing share of resource consumption and emissions. Energy is an essential component of life in the cities, as it supports the whole spectrum of their economic activities and secures a certain level of quality of life to residents. To meet public policy objectives under these circumstances, cities need to change and develop in a smart way, without disregarding the issues of energy efficiency and sustainability. In this context, the aim of this paper is to present a Decision Support Framework able to assess and optimize the energy use in Smart Cities. The proposed methodology is addressed to the cities local authorities, so as to optimize the energy use in their premises and achieve significant reduction of CO2 emissions. The novel Framework includes two pillars: 'Assessment' and 'Optimization'. The 'Assessment' pillar highlights the strengths, the underperforming sectors and the potentials of a city in terms of energy optimization. The 'Optimization' pillar includes a number of targeted action plans that can be used by the building energy managers of a city. The proposed actions in this pillar derive from the DSS for Energy Management component of the Framework that offers short-term scenarios in a weekly basis, and from the DSS for Energy Efficiency component that offers long-term scenarios in a yearly basis. Moreover, these two pillars combine a number of web based components. The 'Assessment' pillar uses The Smart City Energy Assessment Framework tool (e-SCEAF), which can provide fruitful results for assessing the energy behavior and performance of a city. The 'Optimization' pillar uses the Thermal Comfort Validator (TCV) with the relevant action plan and a Toolset for Assessing the Energy use of Buildings. TCV can assist the energy managers in adjusting thermal comfort parameters, in such a way as to optimize energy use and maintain comfort levels in accepted ranges. The Toolset for Assessing the Energy use of Buildings is able to collect real energy consumption data and calculate automatically the energy savings from a list of improvement scenarios. The novelty of the proposed Framework lies on the merging of multidisciplinary data sources from the following domains: weather, building monitoring, users' feedback, energy prices and energy production.