Planning and Management of Buildings’ Energy and Environmental Efficiency in Urban Environment

Dear Colleagues, 

During the last decade, climate change implications have been evermore impactful to the daily life of the population. The frequency and severity of extreme events, such as floods and heat waves, has reached incredible levels. For example, the mean earth peak temperature in 2023 has broken all records. At the same time, today’s urbanization means that people living in cities account for 56% of the population, while future predictions estimate urbanization reaching 68% by the year 2050. This poses a great need to take action and ensure more sustainable cities in the future. Tackling the building sector is indeed of high priority in the context of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. On the one hand, buildings are responsible for about a third of global energy consumption, which means that improved energy efficiency is necessary to reduce energy-induced carbon and GHG emissions, while on the other hand, the urban environment should be resilient to the inevitable impacts of climate change. In parallel, the vast existing building stock implies enormous investments in implementing massive energy renovation projects, especially within the urban fabric; hence, low-cost solutions for the improvement of building energy and environmental performance are of paramount importance. To confront the recognized challenges, innovative and usable tools and methods, taking into account the most important decision-making parameters, are absolutely necessary, even at the study and design stage, for better planning and controlling of building energy efficiency in cities.

This Special Issue aims to present novel advances and insights in the thematics of cost-optimal energy efficiency planning and energy management of building stocks in urban environments, in view of climate change effects in cities.

Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to:

• Urban energy planning;
• Computational and experimental methods for planning energy efficiency in the built environment;
• Multi-criteria decision making in planning strategies for improving the energy efficiency of groups of buildings;
• Participative approaches for involving stakeholders in energy-efficiency planning and management activities;
• Indoor–outdoor physical models for practicing holistic energy and environmental planning for renovation at the district or city scale;
• Formulation of adequate baseline conditions for building energy efficiency assessments, taking into account future predictions of climatic conditions;
• Future-proofed building energy efficiency solutions;
• Model predictive control for building energy efficiency;
• Multi-objective optimization for balancing the most important variables, such as energy, comfort, and air quality, in buildings or groups of buildings;
• Perspectives of exploiting soft and low-cost measures with high impacts, including end-users’ behavioral shift management, sensor-free BEMs, AI techniques, BIM and digital twinning, etc.

Dr. George M. Stavrakakis
Dr. Konstantinos Braimakis
Dr. Dimitrios Katsaprakakis
Guest Editors

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• built-environment energy efficiency
• energy efficiency planning for building stocks
• indoor-outdoor physical interactions
• participative planning
• energy behavioral shift
• building automation and control