About this Research Topic
Built environments and critical urban infrastructure systems are the mainstay of our nation’s economy, security, and health. These systems account for over half of society’s energy consumption and their operations play an important role in sustainability, resilience, and people’s quality of life. Advances in the effective integration of networked sensors, participatory and opportunistic sensing, data analytics, control techniques, and physical infrastructure are transforming our society.
In the information age, unprecedented research at the intersection of cyber-physical infrastructures, human-centered systems, and smart cities has enabled us to tackle the major issues that cities face, e.g., mobility, safety, pollution, increased energy consumption, and traffic congestion. Systems optimization, data analysis, and modeling can be applied to the built environment, by leveraging innovative techniques for acquisition, integration, and analysis of big and heterogeneous data sources. Data collected from sensors, devices, vehicles, buildings, and humans are particularly important in improving our society. These systems represent the foundation for emerging “smart cities”.
BuildSys is the premier conference for researchers and practitioners working to develop and optimize smart infrastructure systems that are driven by sophisticated sensing, computing, data analysis, operational analytics, and control functions.
This Research Topic invites selected papers from BuildSys to extend their work on emerging domains that leverage information-driven systems to further move the built environment toward smarter operations. Topics of interest include but not limited to the following:
• Improved user interfaces to the built environment and civil infrastructure;
• Infrastructure operational analytics;
• Novel sensor methodologies, techniques, and tools;
• Security, privacy, safety, and reliability in built systems;
• Sensing and control of electrical, gas, and water loads;
• Localization and contextual computing for increased human-infrastructure interactions
• Modeling, simulation, optimization, and control of heating, cooling, lighting, ventilation, water usage, and other resource flows in built environments;
• New sociotechnical systems for innovative applications and services to enable more livable, workable, sustainable, and connected communities;
• Sensor systems and applications that enhance the energy efficiency, energy reliability, durability, and comfort;
• Systems that integrate infrastructure with the smart grid to offer demand response and ancillary services;
• Distributed generation, alternative energy, renewable sources, and energy storage in buildings;
• Emerging standards for data collection, energy control, or interoperability of disparate devices or systems;
• Sensing, modeling, and predicting the urban heartbeat including sounds, movements, and radio spectrum;
• Human in the loop sensing and control for efficient usage of electricity, gas, heating, water
• Long-lived and energy harvesting sensor systems;
• Scalable indoor localization and contextual computing;
• Empirical studies of city-scale wireless communications;
• Environmental Sensing; Vehicle technologies, traffic, and sustainable mobility/
Keywords: Systems for Built Environment, Infrastructure Analytics, User Interfaces, Energy-Efficiency, Novel Sensing
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
