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Techno-Social Vision: New Societal Trends Influence Sustainable Development of Future Environment Systems

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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Urban and Rural Development".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2022) | Viewed by 10965

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Bo Zeng

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Guest Editor

School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, North China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206, China
Interests: urban infrastructure planning; technical–social integration; behavioral modeling and simulation

Dr. Youbo Liu

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Guest Editor

Department of Electrical Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China
Interests: intelligent control; power system stability and control; active distribution network dispatch and control; energy storage; artificial intelligence applications in power systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Prof. Dr. Qinran Hu

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Guest Editor

School of Electrical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China
Interests: grid-forming virtual power plant; reliable demand aggregation; economic analysis of low carbon energy systems; power system data analysis
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

With the increasing prominence and diversification of human activities, extensive social interaction has become a significant factor influencing the sustainable development of future cities. Human beings can affect the quality of the natural environment through various forms of social activities, such as energy consumption, population migration, culture propagation, etc. In turn, the natural environment can affect the survival and sustainability of human societies. This interactive relation explains many of the obstacles that human beings face in sustainable development, which can be traced back to specific human activities. Thus, transforming of human activities and adapting to the dynamic changes of environment systems will contribute to the sustainable development of future cities, which will in turn benefit all of the stakeholders involved.

The scope of this Special Issue includes (but is not limited to):

(1) The impact of COVID-19 on human and societal activities;

(2) Societal factors in urban power and energy systems;

(3) Cultural environment and sustainable development;

(4) Enabling technologies for sustainable physical–social systems;

(5) Behavior psychology simulation in human environment.

The aim of this Special Issue is to support the sustainable development of future environment systems from the perspective of social factorization and help to further enrich and improve the basics of existing practices.

Dr. Bo Zeng
Dr. Youbo Liu
Dr. Qinran Hu
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. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly 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 2400 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.

Keywords

human factor
social trend
environment system
behavior
sustainable development

Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

19 pages, 2428 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Sustainability Improvement Strategy of Interconnected Data Centers Based on Dispatching Potential of Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

by Xihao Wang, Xiaojun Wang, Yuqing Liu, Chun Xiao, Rongsheng Zhao, Ye Yang and Zhao Liu

Sustainability 2022, 14(11), 6814; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14116814 - 2 Jun 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1637

Abstract

With the rapid development of information technology, the electricity consumption of Internet Data Centers (IDCs) increases drastically, resulting in considerable carbon emissions that need to be reduced urgently. In addition to the introduction of Renewable Energy Sources (RES), the joint use of the spatial migration capacity of IDC workload and the temporal flexibility of the demand of Electric Vehicle Charging Stations (EVCSs) provides an important means to change the carbon footprint of the IDC. In this paper, a sustainability improvement strategy for the IDC carbon emission reduction was developed by coordinating the spatial-temporal dispatch flexibilities of the IDC workload and the EVCS demand. Based on the Minkowski sum algorithm, a generalized flexible load model of the EVCSs, considering traffic flow and Road Impedance (RI) was formulated. The case studies show that the proposed method can effectively increase the renewable energy consumption, reduce the overall carbon emissions of multi-IDCs, reduce the energy cost of the DCO, and utilize the EV dispatching potential. Discussions are also provided on the relationship between workload processing time delay and the renewable energy consumption rate. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Techno-Social Vision: New Societal Trends Influence Sustainable Development of Future Environment Systems)

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22 pages, 4711 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Profit Allocation Strategy of Virtual Power Plant Based on Multi-Objective Optimization in Electricity Market

by Yuqing Wang, Min Zhang, Jindi Ao, Zhaozhen Wang, Houqi Dong and Ming Zeng

Sustainability 2022, 14(10), 6229; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14106229 - 20 May 2022

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 1995

Abstract

A virtual power plant (VPP) can aggregate distributed renewable energy and flexible load to participate in the electricity market as a virtual controllable assembly. This pattern can effectively avoid the bidding risk of users, and produce cooperation benefits such as reducing transaction costs. Reasonable profit allocation is the key factor to determine the formation and survival of a VPP, which means a reasonable allocation for the VPP’s market income among participating members. In view of that, this paper proposes a framework of profit allocation in VPPs based on cooperative game theory. Aiming at the competitive environment with multiple VPPs in the electricity market, a VPP’s profit allocation model based on bidding optimization is built, which considers multiple objectives such as fairness of profit allocation, stability of cooperation alliance, and attraction of participating members. Furthermore, a multi-objective evolutionary optimization algorithm based on reference points is introduced to solve the model. Then, a VPP composed of prosumers is taken as an example to carry out the emulation. The results show that all participating members can get satisfactory profit allocation. Its cost-saving ratio ranges from 7.82% to 18.66%, and it confirms that the proposed profit allocation method can encourage prosumers of small size to participate in the VPP cooperation effectively. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Techno-Social Vision: New Societal Trends Influence Sustainable Development of Future Environment Systems)

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30 pages, 8956 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Sustainable Insights for Energy Big Data Governance in China: Full Life Cycle Curation from the Ecosystem Perspective

by Ming Zeng, Yanbin Xu, Haoyu Wu, Jiaxin Ma and Jianwei Gao

Sustainability 2022, 14(10), 6013; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14106013 - 16 May 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2450

Abstract

With the development of the Energy Internet and the Internet of Things, diversified social production activities are making the interactions between energy, business, and information flow among physical, social, and information systems increasingly complex. As the carrier of information and the hub between physical and social systems, the effective management of energy big data has attracted the attention of scholars. This work indicates that China’s energy companies have carried out a series of activities that are centered on energy big data collection, as well as development and exchange, and that the energy big data ecosystem has begun to take shape. However, the research on and the application of energy big data are mainly limited to micro-level fields, and the development of energy big data in China remains disordered because the corresponding macro-level instructive governance frameworks are lacking. In this work, to facilitate the sustainable development of the energy big data ecosystem and to solve existing problems, such as the difficult-to-determine governance boundaries and the difficult-to-coordinate interests, and to analyze the structure and mechanism of the energy big data ecosystem, data curation is introduced into energy big data governance, and a paradigm is constructed for sustainable energy big data curation that encompasses its full life cycle, including the planning, integration, application, and maintenance stages. Key paradigmatic issues are analyzed in-depth, including data rights, fusion, security, and transactions. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Techno-Social Vision: New Societal Trends Influence Sustainable Development of Future Environment Systems)

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18 pages, 1846 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Economy and Policy Incorporated Computing System for Social Energy and Power Consumption Analysis

by Hang Zhao, Jun Zhang, Xiaohui Wang, Hongxia Yuan, Tianlu Gao, Chenxi Hu and Jing Yan

Sustainability 2021, 13(18), 10473; https://doi.org/10.3390/su131810473 - 21 Sep 2021

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1915

Abstract

Human activities, such as energy consumption and economic development, will significantly affect the natural environment, while changes in the natural environment will also affect the sustainability of human society. Studying the energy consumption changes of human society and forecasting medium and long-term electricity demand will help realize the sustainable development of energy in future society. However, current medium- and long-term electricity consumption forecasts have insufficient data samples and the inability to consider policy impacts. Here, we develop an Economy and Policy Incorporated Computing System (EPICS), which can use artificial intelligence technology to extract the summaries of energy policy texts automatically and calculate the importance index of energy policy. It can also process economic data of different lengths to expand samples of medium- and long-term electricity consumption forecasting effectively. A forecasting method that considers policy factors and mixed-frequency economic data is introduced to estimate future social energy and power consumption. This method has shown good forecasting ability in 27 months. The effect of EPICS can be demonstrated by predicting the medium- and long-term electricity demand. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Techno-Social Vision: New Societal Trends Influence Sustainable Development of Future Environment Systems)

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19 pages, 5135 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Shared Bicycle Distribution Connected to Subway Line Considering Citizens’ Morning Peak Social Characteristics for Urban Low-Carbon Development

by Shuo Zhang, Li Chen and Yingzi Li

Sustainability 2021, 13(16), 9263; https://doi.org/10.3390/su13169263 - 18 Aug 2021

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2221

Abstract

The transport sector has produced numerous carbon emissions in China, and it is important to promote low carbon commuting. As an emerging mode of urban low-carbon transportation in China, shared bicycles have been used by more and more citizens on a daily basis, with advantages of green and low-carbon emissions to environment, flexibility for short trips, and convenience for covering the distance between the normal low-carbon transportation and destinations. However, the imbalanced distribution of shared bicycles along subway lines, especially during the morning peak hours, has directly restricted their performance in urban traffic. In this paper, an integer linear program model (ILPM) is proposed to obtain an optimal low-carbon distribution plan of shared bicycles connecting with the subway line (SBCSL) during the morning peak hours. First, an objective function is built to improve the carbon emission reduction of SBCSL. Second, constraint functions are extracted considering the quantity of bicycles to be distributed to the subway line as well as the distribution limits of each subway station. At last, a case study is conducted on the distribution of shared bicycles in Beijing Subway Line 13 of China during the morning peak hours. The results show that the ILPM is of significance to provide optimal distribution scheme of shared bicycles in subway line with different station types including office-oriented, residential-oriented, and hybrid-oriented stations. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Techno-Social Vision: New Societal Trends Influence Sustainable Development of Future Environment Systems)

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