Raising awareness among young people and changing their behaviour and habits concerning energy usage is key to achieving sustained energy saving. Additionally, young people are very sensitive to environmental protection so raising awareness among children is much easier than with any other group of citizens. This work examines ways to create an innovative Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) ecosystem (including web-based, mobile, social and sensing elements) tailored specifically for school environments, taking into account both the users (faculty, staff, students, parents) and school buildings, thus motivating and supporting young citizens’ behavioural change to achieve greater energy efficiency. A mixture of open-source IoT hardware and proprietary platforms on the infrastructure level, are currently being utilized for monitoring a fleet of 18 educational buildings across 3 countries, comprising over 700 IoT monitoring points. Hereon presented is the system’s high-level architecture, as well as several aspects of its implementation, related to the application domain of educational building monitoring and energy efficiency. The system is developed based on open-source technologies and services in order to make it capable of providing open IT-infrastructure and support from different commercial hardware/sensor vendors as well as open-source solutions. The system presented can be used to develop and offer new app-based solutions that can be used either for educational purposes or for managing the energy efficiency of the building. The system is replicable and adaptable to settings that may be different than the scenarios envisioned here (e.g., targeting different climate zones), different IT infrastructures and can be easily extended to accommodate integration with other systems. The overall performance of the system is evaluated in real-world environment in terms of scalability, responsiveness and simplicity.
Urban ecosystems are becoming one of the most potentially attractive scenarios for innovating new services and technologies. In parallel, city managers, urban utilities and other stakeholders are fostering the intensive use of advanced technologies aiming at improving present city performance and sustainability. The deployment of such technology entails the generation of massive amounts of information which in many cases might become useful for other services and applications. Hence, aiming at taking advantage of such massive amounts of information and deployed technology as well as breaking down the potential digital barrier, some easy-to-use tools have to be made available to the urban stakeholders. These tools integrated in a platform, operated directly or indirectly by the city, provide a singular opportunity for exploiting the concept of connected city whilst promoting innovation in all city dimensions and making the co-creation concept a reality, with an eventual impact on government policies.
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