Advanced ICT platform for real-time monitoring and infrastructure efficiency/ management at the city level

OPTIMUS DSS is a web-based system which uses multidisciplinary data from five different domains (weather conditions, buildings’ energy profiles, occupants’ feedback, energy prices and energy production) to make predictions of the building energy performance and help energy managers to adopt measures (namely short-term Action Plans) to improve it. The OPTIMUS DSS offers among others the following Action Plans:

• Scheduling and management of the occupancy: It aims at the reduction of the building energy consumption by changing the location of building occupants. This way, a minimum number of thermal zones can be used and the consumption can be reduced by turning off the heating/cooling system in the unoccupied zones.
• Scheduling the set-point temperature: Based on the application of two inference rules, this Action Plan is aimed to adjust the indoor temperature set-point by taking into consideration, respectively, thermal comfort as submitted by the building users (using the TCV web application), and the adaptive comfort concept. The target is to optimize energy use, while maintaining comfort levels in accepted ranges.
• Scheduling the ON/OFF of the heating system: Based on three inference rules, it aims at the optimization of the boost time of the heating system taking into account the forecasting of the indoor air temperature and the occupancy levels of the building.
• Scheduling the photovoltaic (PV) maintenance: It aims at the detection of the need for maintenance of the PV system, alerting the user to check if corrective actions are necessary. This facilitates the identification of PV malfunctioning.
• Management of the air side Economizer: It involves scheduling of the amount of outdoor air to be used for cooling the indoor environment, in order to reduce or eliminate the need for mechanical cooling when favorable conditions occur, using air-side economizer technology.
• Scheduling the sale/consumption of the electricity produced through the PV system: Optimization of selling/self-consumption of electricity produced by a PV system considering different scenarios of energy market (green strategy, finance strategy and peak strategy).
• Scheduling the operation of heating and electricity systems towards energy cost optimization: The main goal of the action plan is to schedule the operation of the thermal and electricity systems (PV production, CHP systems, electricity storage, the Grid and the boilers) of an energy network towards energy cost reduction.

Publications List:

Doukas H., Marinakis V., Spiliotis V., Psarras J. (2016). OPTIMUS Decision Support Tools: Transforming Multidisciplinary Data to Energy Management Action Plans. IEEE - The 7^th International Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications (IISA 2016), 13-14 July 2016, Chalkidiki, Greece. View More

Marinakis V., Doukas H., Spiliotis E., Papastamatiou I. (2017). Decision Support for Intelligent Energy Management in Buildings Using the Thermal Comfort Model. International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems, 10(1):882-893. View More

Androulaki S., Doukas H., Marinakis V., Madrazo L., Legaki N.Z. (2016). Enabling Local Authorities to Produce Short-Term Energy Plans: A Multidisciplinary Decision Support Approach. Management of Environmental Quality, 27(2):146-166. View More