Combining BIM, GIS, and IoT to Foster Energy Management and Simulation in Smart Cities

This chapter presents a novel distributed software infrastructure to enable energy management and simulation of novel control strategies in smart cities. In this context, the following heterogeneous information, describing the different entities in a city, needs to be taken into account to form a unified district information model: internet-of-things (IoT) devices, building information model, system information model, and georeferenced information system. IoT devices are crucial to monitor in (near-) real-time both building energy trends and environmental data. Thus, the proposed solution fulfills the integration and interoperability of such data sources providing also a correlation among them. Such correlation is the key feature to unlock management and simulation of novel energy policies aimed at optimizing the energy usage accounting also for its impact on building comfort. The platform has been deployed in a real-world district and a novel control policy for the heating distribution network has been developed and tested. Finally, experimental results are presented and discussed.