Smart and Sustainable Buildings: New Trends, Technologies, and Integration in the Energy Transition

Dear Colleagues,

The Guest Editors are inviting submissions to a Special Issue of Buildings entitled “Smart and Sustainable Buildings: New Trends, Technologies, and Integration in the Energy Transition”. Buildings’ energy consumption represents more than 40% of the energy produced worldwide: about the 50% of this energy is consumed in heating, cooling, and air conditioning (HVAC). Several milestones have been accomplished in the building technology sector in order to improve energy efficiency, with the use of innovative applications able to reduce energy consumption and enhance indoor environmental quality in buildings. These efforts are currently considered the most important challenge, together with the use of renewables. Building-integrated generation from renewable sources (BIPVs and thermal solar) represents a potential solution to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings. The generated energy can be used locally in the building, and the excess can be shared among the community or stored by means of electric-thermal storage solutions. The energy demand of the building can also be harmonized to achieve maximum self-consumption of energy, also exploiting efficient thermal and electrical storage for delayed use. Smart buildings should also be integrated into smart cities, connected to the electrical grid and sharing energy in a renewable energy community. The purpose of this Special Issue is to collect all of the recent and novel contributions, both in the form of theoretical and field-validated studies, on the following topics:

• Efficient management of the building energy footprint;
• Integration of energy generation from renewable sources in architecture and buildings;
• Novel materials, technologies and building techniques for energy efficiency;
• Thermal and environmental modelling of buildings;
• IoT applications in the environmental, energetic, and anthropic monitoring of buildings;
• Energy demand management and forecasting;
• Machine learning and deep learning techniques applied to smart buildings;
• Smart building integration in smart cities: EV mobility and renewable energy communities.

Dr. Elisa Belloni
Dr. Gabriele Maria Lozito
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.

• smart buildings
• sustainable buildings
• renewables
• BIPV (building-integrated photovoltaics)
• building energy services
• energy management
• energy consumption forecasting
• Internet of Things
• machine learning for smart building energy data
• grid integration and control