**About the Editors**

### **Benedetto Nastasi**

Assistant Professor in Smart Energy Systems for the Built Environment at the Department of Planning, Design and Technology of Architecture at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. He is an alumnus of Sapienza University of Rome, from which he graduated Summa Cum Laude in Architectural and Building Engineering in 2011 and obtained his Ph.D. with Honors in Energy Saving and Distributed Microgeneration in 2015. From 2015 to 2019, he worked as a Researcher at TU/e Eindhoven University of Technology, Guglielmo Marconi University and TU Delft University of Technology. He has also worked as an Energy and Sustainability Consultant at ISES International Solar Energy Society, Italy, and ANEV, the Italian Wind Energy Association. He has won several awards for his research, including the Best Poster Award at SEE SDEWES, 2016, Best Invited Session Chairman at SEB, 2017, and Best Senior Researcher at the Smart Energy Systems Conference, 2018, and Best Young Investigator in Building Science, 2022. His research interests are in innovative energy systems from the building to urban scale, transition pathways to zero-carbon built environments, pioneering hydrogen applications, open data, and energy analytics. He has been ranked in the top 2% of researchers worldwide in both "Building & Construction" and "Energy" fields by the Stanford University study in 2019, in 2020 and in 2021.

### **Andrea Mauri**

Junior Professor (Chaire de Professor Junior) at Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, affiliated with ´ the Liris Research Lab. Previously, Postdoctoral Researcher within the Knowledge and Intelligence Design Group at the Sustainable Design Engineering Department at the Delft University of Technology and a Research fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions. His research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Data Management. Interested in investigating how to integrate human perspective and computational methods in the design, development and deployment of data-intensive applications, with a special focus on the health domain, with the goal of making them efficient, effective, and aware of people's characteristics, needs, and values.

## *Editorial* **Energy Consumption in a Smart City**

**Benedetto Nastasi 1,\* and Andrea Mauri <sup>2</sup>**


### **1. Overview of the Articles in This Special Issue**

Increasing and inexorable urbanization calls for the involvement of all the stakeholders. This includes energy providers, policymakers in the municipality, facility managers, and the citizens themselves, as energy consumption is influenced by this interconnected network of actors. The Smartness of the City enhances the interactions between those actors because its architecture already integrates elements to collect data and connect to the citizens. Furthermore, the proliferation of Web platforms (e.g., social media, Web fora) and the increased affordability of sensors and IoT devices (e.g., smart meters) make data related to a large and diverse set of users accessible, as their activities in the digital world reflect their real-life actions. These new technologies can be of great use for the stakeholders as, on one hand, it provides them with semantically rich inputs and frequent updates at a relatively cheap cost and, on the other, it allows them to have a direct channel of communication with the citizens.

This Special Issue aims to provide insights on original multidisciplinary research works about AI, data science methods, and their integration with existing design/decisionmaking processes in the domain of energy consumption in a Smart City. For this purpose, the Special Issue "Energy Consumption in a Smart City" has been designed and launched, intended for researcher, planners, users of the broad domain of the Smart City. Among a very high number of submissions, 11 articles have been accepted and published.

The first paper by Dharani et al. [1] presents the strategies to manage energy flows in a limited portion of the urban environment, i.e., the University campus, by an intelligent use of time-varying electrical load via developing efficient energy utilization patterns using demand-side management (DSM).

The second paper by Esfandiari et al. [2] investigates and assess the quality of the indoor environment of Platinum-certified office buildings in a tropical climate through surveys and questionnaire highlighting the human-centric perception of comfort that, whatever technologies are going to be included, is the requirement of the built environment.

The third paper of this Special Issue by Mousavi Motlagh et al. [3] propose a way for acquiring the foremost window allocation scheme to have the best trade-off among energy, environmental, and comfort criteria in a building by an advanced decision-making tool.

The fourth paper by Bazazzadeh et al. [4] focuses on the impact of climate change on the heating and cooling energy demands of buildings as influential variables in building energy consumption by the statistical downscaling method accounting for the future forecasted weather data for 2050 and 2080 and derived increased cooling demand calling for serious measures to control it.

The fifth paper by Csáky [5] focuses on the future cooling demand increase in buildings explaining how it greatly depends on the building structure, window coverage, and orientation. The detailed findings in the paper will be useful in the future for building renters and operators that have to manage the cooling systems during the—future more often—torrid days.

**Citation:** Nastasi, B.; Mauri, A. Energy Consumption in a Smart City. *Energies* **2022**, *15*, 7555. https:// doi.org/10.3390/en15207555

Received: 6 October 2022 Accepted: 11 October 2022 Published: 13 October 2022

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

The sixth paper of this Special Issue, by Cumo et al. [6] dealt with the different limitations in the transition of historical buildings to near zero energy (nZEB), including invasive interventions, historical and architectural structure constraints and impact on heritage value. The integration of renewable energy technology is seen as the way to reduce the energy footprint of such buildings.

In the seventh paper, Agostinelli et al. [7] discusses an infrastructure digitization policy to manage and optimize the energy transition process to transform ports area into zero energy districts. The strategies are not only aimed at the energy transition but have implications on the environmental, economic and social spheres, setting the port area as the epicenter and extending to the city.

In the eighth paper, Sureshkumar et al. [8] focus on induction heating for melting applications assisted by electronic power control as appealing technology since it provides higher efficiency, zero pollutants, non-contamination of material, etc. in comparison with conventional heating.

The ninth paper by Casini [9] is a review study on virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) technologies and applications for smart building operation and maintenance. The application of XR in building and city management is showing promising results in enhancing human performance in technical O&M tasks.

In the tenth paper, Bruck et al. [10] propose a new method to compare European neighborhoods to plan the energy infrastructures needed for the energy transition. They identified a set of parameters to build a QGIS-based visualization that allows them to compare different areas easily and directly.

Finally, the last article by Liu et al. [11] analyzed the Smart City Policy (SCP) set in China as significant tool to reduce the carbon emission intensity of enterprises in urban contexts. The mechanism analysis finds that digital transformation, innovation by enterprises, and urban green innovation all strengthen the impact of SCP on the carbon emission intensity of enterprises via a smart way.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, B.N. and A.M.; writing—original draft preparation, B.N. and A.M.; writing—review and editing, B.N. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

### **References**

