Editorial

Abstract

in partnership with KES International. Annually, the conference brings together researchers and government and industry professionals to discuss the future of energy in buildings, neighbourhoods and cities from a theoretical, practical, implementation and simulation perspective.Built upon the success of previous conferences, the seventh conference in the SEB series attracted a large number of submissions from all around the world, which were subjected to a two-stage peer review process. With the objective of producing a high-quality conference, papers were selected for presentation at the conference and publication in the proceedings. The scope of Sustainability and Energy in Buildings is extensive and 57 oral presentations were delivered during SEB15. Extended and revised versions of the top eight articles, which were selected by the SEB scientific committee and Engineering Sustainability editorial panel, are included in this and a subsequent themed issue to disseminate further the leading research in this field first presented at SEB15. The selected papers cover emerging research topics in the areas of energy and buildings, including big data, renewable energy integration, energy performance gap, advanced materials and technologies in building construction, hybrid energy systems and smart cities.Recently, the big data concept has been gaining considerable attention for tackling complex and challenging engineering problems; in particular, it is notably impacting the civil engineering sector. Big data analytics is transforming the way civil infrastructure systems are constructed, operated and maintained. It provides valuable insights from a large amount of data collected through various sources to optimise decision-making, save energy, improve safety and reduce cost. Some of its applications in the civil engineering sector include structural health and environmental monitoring (Yeum et al., 2016), waste and water management, urban planning and operation (Tkachenko et al., 2015), smart buildings (Gruber et al., 2016) and mobility (Valdez et al., 2015). The first article in this issue presents a data mining-based methodology for setting decision-making rules to identify the energy consumption patterns of a large data set of flats and investigate different energy retrofit actions. The influence of four attributes on the normalised primary energy demand of 92 906 flats in northern Italy are analysed. The paper covers crucial aspects of practical relevance for authority planners and building energy experts and designers.Similar to the work of Capozzoli et al. (2017), the method proposed by Gagliano et al. (2017) in the second paper aims to support decision makers to estimate the energy consumption of residential, commercial and industrial buildings and evaluate the possible effects of different energy strategies. The complexity of urban energy supply and demand is increasing rapidly with the diversity of energy technologies that participate in the energy system, such as integration of renewables, electric vehicles, ...

Editorial

“…Annually, the conference brings together researchers and government and industry professionals to discuss the future of energy in buildings, neighbourhoods and cities from a theoretical, practical, implementation and simulation perspective. Part one of the issue (Calautit, 2017) explored emerging research topics in the areas of energy and buildings, including big data, renewable energy integration, energy performance gap, advanced materials and technologies in building construction, hybrid energy systems and smart cities. Part two focuses on topical issues in engineering sustainability including embodied energy and emissions, energy modelling, external wall insulation, in-construction testing methods and energy sources in non-interconnected regions.…”