Future Generation Computer Systems ( ) –

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Future Generation Computer Systems

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/fgcs

From big data to smart energy services: An application for intelligent

energy management
Vangelis Marinakis a, *, Haris Doukas a , John Tsapelas a , Spyros Mouzakitis a ,
Álvaro Sicilia b , Leandro Madrazo b , Sgouris Sgouridis c
a
Decision Support Systems Laboratory, School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece
b
ARC Enginyeria I Arquitectura La Salle, Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona, Spain
c
Khalifa University, Masdar Institute, United Arab Emirates

highlights

• High level architecture of a big data platform for smart energy services.
• Integration of heterogeneous types of data from multiple domains and sources.
• A ‘‘data-driven’’ DSS for exploiting multidisciplinary data within a smart city context.
• Support energy managers for managing their building facilities’ energy performance.
• Pilot application and validation of the developed DSS system in three European cities.

article info a b s t r a c t
Article history: Big data is an ascendant technological concepts and includes smart energy services, such as intelligent en-
Received 21 August 2017 ergy management, energy consumption prediction and exploitation of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.
Received in revised form 14 March 2018 As a result, big data technologies will have a significant impact in the energy sector. This paper proposes a
Accepted 21 April 2018
high level architecture of a big data platform that can support the creation, development, maintenance and
Available online xxxx
exploitation of smart energy services through the utilisation of cross-domain data. The proposed platform
Keywords: enables the simplification of the procedure followed for the information gathering by multiple sources,
Big data turning into actionable recommendations and meaningful operational insights for city authorities and
Decision support system local administrations, energy managers and consultants, energy service companies, utilities and energy
Energy services providers. A web-based Decision Support System (DSS) has been developed according to the proposed
Intelligent management architecture, exploiting multi-sourced data within a smart city context towards the creation of energy
Smart Cities management action plans. The pilot application of the developed DSS in three European cities is presented
and discussed. This ‘‘data-driven’’ DSS can support energy managers and city authorities for managing
their building facilities’ energy performance.
© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction A massive amount of data is generated from a wide spectrum

The increasing momentum of big data applications constitutes
a significant opportunity for the energy sector in the field of en-
ergy management, environmental protection, and energy conser-
vation [1]. In recent years, large amounts of energy consumption
and production data are being generated and the energy systems
are being digitised, with the increasing penetration of emerging
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). ICTs, Inter-
net of Things (IoT) and data analytics constitute a catalyst towards
conceptualising and generating new energy and climate solutions.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: vmarinakis@epu.ntua.gr (V. Marinakis).
of energy-related sources. Energy big data not only include the
massive smart meter reading data, but also the huge amount of
related data from other sources, such as weather and climate
data, asset management data, Energy Performance Certificates (EP
Certificates), building stock auditing, Sustainable Energy and Cli-
mate Action Plans (SECAPs), socioeconomic data, energy end-user’s
characteristics and comfort levels, etc. Organisations can extract
value from this volume and variety of data, by enabling high-
velocity capture mechanisms coupled with effective data analyt-
ics [2].
Typically, data are not only traditional structured relational
data, but also semi-structured data (e.g. weather and Web services
data), as well as unstructured data (e.g. customer behaviour data,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.04.062
0167-739X/© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: V. Marinakis, et al., From big data to smart energy services: An application for intelligent energy management, Future Generation
Computer Systems (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.04.062.
2 V. Marinakis et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems (
information contained in documents in formats such as .pdfs or
.html, etc.) [3,4]. The lack of a commonly accepted semantics
framework makes data integration and exploitation an even harder
to tackle problem. Integrating these data in multiple formats to
create large volumes of data which can be processed in real time
is a first challenge to be addressed. However, the challenge is not
constrained to the data acquisition and storage, but it concerns
also the analysis and processing of big data. The speed of data
analysis and processing should be optimum given the massive
volume of data; there are many streaming data and relatively
large volumes data changing at a given time. In this respect, data
analytics processes that need hours to run are not efficient enough.
Combining data from different domains (energy, environment,
economics and financing, user behaviour and societal trends, and
many more) can open a wide spectrum of innovative ICT solutions.
Indeed, dealing with energy big data requires new technologies
to efficiently process large quantities of data. As a result, there is
the need for a cross-sectorial and cross-disciplinary data integra-
tion approach that will foster innovative energy services.
Therefore, ICT is the ‘main integrator’ of infrastructure and
management solutions and ICT-enabled technologies are rapidly
gaining ground to manage energy systems, allowing households,
neighbourhoods, towns and cities to share energy production and
consumption capacity, generate local energy and become self-
sufficient. Through the use of ICT-based management systems,
the building’s intelligent systems can communicate with the en-
ergy providers to control cooling, heating, lighting and hot water
systems, to ensure a more stable energy supply, optimising the
management of demand peaks and resources at a local level. In
particular, the application of ICT related technology in buildings is
closely linked to the implementation of smart meter technologies,
providing opportunity for consumer feedback on energy consump-
tion.
Energy Management Systems (EMSs) are increasing their dif-
fusion and are anticipated to witness the fastest growth over the
next years, also with the integration of big data and data analytics
in the existing EMS modules. According to a report published by
Grand View Research, the global EMS market is expected to reach
$58.6 billion by 2022, registering a Compound Annual Growth
Rate (CAGR) of 14.3% over the period 2014–2020. In particular, the
European market for EMS is expected to grow at a CAGR of 23.58%
to reach $11.89 billion by 2019 from the current estimates of $4.13
billion in 2014 [5].
In particular, the adoption of Building Energy Management
Systems (BEMS) is expected to increase rapidly due to its varied
application in the Healthcare, Telecom and IT sectors, educational
institutions, universities and commercial buildings like shopping
malls, offices etc. [6]. A white paper by Navigant Research cal-
culates the BEMS revenues in 2015 in $2.4 billion and estimates
the market to grow up to $10.4 billion by 2024 [7]. Europe is
also believed to be the most promising market, followed by North
America and Asia Pacific.
The connectivity and data flow associated with the IoT will
also support the broader adoption of BEMS [8]. Rich sources of
data enable better ways to manage and measure buildings and
portfolios of buildings [9]. Considering that 90 percent of all data
generated by devices like smartphones, connected meters and
appliances is never analysed or acted upon, the ability to integrate
intelligent devices for data analytics will be key to gain competitive
advantage and meet the needs of an ever-growing audience of
energy management stakeholders.
This paper proposes a high level architecture of a big data
platform that can support the creation, development, mainte-
nance and exploitation of smart energy services through the util-
isation of cross-domain data. This blueprint for a smart energy
platform enables the integration of heterogeneous types of data
Please cite this article in press as: V. Marinakis, et al., From big data to smart energy services: An application for intelligent energy management, Future Generation
Computer Systems (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.04.062.
) –
(open data, sensor/IoT, historical data, etc.) from multiple do-
mains and sources, including among others data related to energy
consumption/production, EP Certificates, SECAPs, European Union
(EU) Building Stock Observatory, locational information, weather
conditions, environment, financing/prices, end-users’ behaviour
and demographics. The proposed platform can simplify the com-
plexity of the information gathered by those sources, turning into
actionable recommendations and meaningful operational insights
for city authorities and local administrations, energy managers and
consultants, utilities and energy providers, Energy Service Compa-
nies (ESCOs) and other energy companies, construction companies,
building components manufacturers, investors and financiers and
other organisations and third parties.
A Decision Support System (DSS) has been developed, in line
with these directions, aiming effectively utilise multi-sourced data
within a smart city context towards the creation of energy man-
agement action plans. The pilot application and validation of the
developed DSS system in three European cities is presented and
discussed: (a) Sant Cugat Town Hall and Theatre, in Spain; (b)
Savona Campus and Colombo-Pertini School, in Italy; (c) Zaanstad
Town Hall, in the Netherlands. This ‘‘data-driven’’ DSS can, there-
fore, support energy managers and city authorities for managing
their building facilities’ energy performance.
The remainder of the paper is structured along six sections.
The progress beyond the state-of-the-art of energy data analytic
platforms, big data cleaning, processing and analytics, as well as
big data exploration and visualisation is provided in Section 2. Sec-
tion 3 presents the potential for integrating big data in the energy
sector. Section 4 is devoted to the presentation of the internal
architecture of the big data platform for smart energy services.
Section 5 provides a description of the propose DSS. Section 6
presents the real life application of the ‘‘data-driven’’ system in the
selected cities. Finally, the last section summarises the key issues
that have arisen in this paper.
2. Progress beyond the state-of-the-art
2.1. Energy data analytic platforms
In the last couple of years, several energy data repositories
and energy data analytics platforms, with various levels of open-
ness, data updates, maintenance, automation and extensibility.
Energydata.info [10] is an open data platform providing access to
datasets and data analytics that are relevant to the energy sector.
Energy DataBus [11], developed by the US Energy Department’s
National Renewable Energy Laboratory, is used for tracking and
analysing energy consumption data in structures such as smart
building and campuses, and achieved scale by building on top of
the Cassandra [12] big data storage backend. KNIME [13] is a Swiss
start-up providing an open source big data analytics platform with
extensive support for energy data as a major use case [14]. Finally,
Energywise [15] is an energy analytics tool developed by Agentis
Energy to make commercial buildings more energy efficient by
profiling energy consumption and giving building managers in-
sights on how to make their buildings more energy efficient.
The above-mentioned open source platforms are either exper-
imental, outdated or not actively supported, while proprietary
energy/climate data management and analytics software is rather
expensive for many stakeholders like smaller utility companies
and energy consumers. This paper strives towards the elaboration
of a free, easily integrated, architecturally open alternative that will
enable high-level energy/climate data management, analytics and
monitoring applications. Moreover, the volume and variation of
energy/climate data, especially sensor measurements, means that
while many solutions might operate ‘well enough’ in isolated cases
or for a limited period of time, utilising big data technologies is
 V. Marinakis et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems (
the only viable way to maintain and operate on a more centralised
level, which is required for effective decision and policy making.
The proposed architecture is built upon such big data technolo-
gies instead of including them to an outdated architecture as an
afterthought. It brings together the latest advances in big data stor-
age and analytics technologies with state-of-art energy/climate
analytics models and apply data-specific optimisations to achieve
performance and scale.
2.2. Big data cleaning, processing and analytics
Data storage and management for big data is a flourishing
field which has seen large advancements in the latest years.
Hadoop [16] has become synonymous to big data, as it has been
able to penetrate into large businesses, but truly harnessing its
power requires commitment from the developer’s perspective.
Cloudera [17] is a cloud-based service to help businesses integrate
and manage Hadoop with some extent of data security built in,
while MongoDB [18] is a modern alternative to relational databases
which can, in certain scenarios, reduce operational overhead up
to 95% [19]. Data cleaning can also be an important part of the
business workflow, especially in a domain like maritime activities
where sensor data can occasionally provide false or defective in-
formation. OpenRefine [20] is an open source tool, developed by
Google, to explore and clean huge, even partially unstructured,
datasets. DataCleaner [21] transforms semi-structured data sets
into readable data to improve data visualisation, with support for
data warehousing and data management services.
Data analytics tools have always been valuable assets to busi-
nesses and organisations, and big data analytics are also seeing
growing interest and business market shares. BigML [22] is a ma-
chine learning service with an easy-to-use interface to get predic-
tions, also offering models for predictive analytics, while private
virtual cloud is offered for enterprises. Qubole [23] simplifies big
data analytics as it integrates directly data storage services like
AWS, Google and Azure. Querying data is also made easy, as sup-
port for big data querying tools like Hive and Spark is built in.
Both tools are enterprise solutions, but that require little technical
background from their users. Lumify [24] is an open source alter-
native built on top of Hadoop and Accumulo focusing on big data
analytics and visualisations, but it has significantly smaller options
and analytics algorithms than its commercial counterparts. Finally,
Talend [25] is another open source tool suite that offers, between
others, the ability to easily run analytics using Hadoop technologies
like HDFS, HBase, Hive, Pig, and Sqoop. Although it seems very
promising, it is still in beta and it lacks any support for cross-origin
data.
Currently, energy/climate related data are plagued by the exis-
tence of various competing, incompatible formats with unclear se-
mantics, especially when taking under consideration big datasets
and streaming data. The proposed big data platform will enrich
data with semantic information, thus vastly improving interop-
erability between different data sources and management of the
aggregated data. Existing data cleaning tools can handle big data
but are not specialised to the energy/climate domain. The proposed
platform will exploit unique characteristics of energy/climate data
(such as predictability of sensor intervals, well defined value
ranges etc.) in order to improve the data cleaning process. In addi-
tion, big data analytic tools and algorithms are becoming extremely
powerful, efficient and effective. However, a large barrier-to-entry
for non-technical and even technical users, as well as little to
no specialisation for different domains, limits their actual impact.
We will use powerful analytics tools, alongside with its novelties
in energy/climate data semantics to provide a simple interface
while minimising overhead in resources and manpower required
to utilise big data analytics.
Please cite this article in press as: V. Marinakis, et al., From big data to smart energy services: An application for intelligent energy management, Future Generation
Computer Systems (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.04.062.
) – 3
2.3. Big data exploration and visualisation
Visualising big data is often considered one of the most promi-
nent difficulties associated with them, as it is seen as funda-
mentally hard to create a perceivable visual graph of amounts
of data inconceivable to human cognitive. Big data visualisations
tools have developed at least some insight of the visualised data,
in order to propose the most appropriate data metrics that it is
meaningful to represent. Zoomdata [26] is a commercial product
that provides ‘‘simple, intuitive and collaborative’’ interactive big
data visualisations, and it has been integrated with most big data
storage solutions. Tableu [27] is another commercial, mature big
data visualisation tool offered both as a standalone as well as an
online, cloud-based service. Finally, DataWatch [28] provides real
time visualisations of streaming data, and it is used by companies,
such as IBM and NASDAQ.
Most open source products for big data visualisation are clearly
inferior to their proprietary counterparts, making it rather cost
inefficient for many stakeholders, such as energy consumers, both
individuals as well as SMEs, to acquire access to high-quality big
energy/climate data visualisations. Developing high quality tools,
we will enable stakeholders to consume and create such visualisa-
tions. Typically, energy/climate data management tools use stan-
dard techniques to visualise original data as well as their results.
However, it is becoming clear that novel ideas and approaches
achieve significantly better results in visualising data from various
energy sub-sectors. The proposed big data platform will explore,
develop and test such novel visualisation techniques, aiming to
achieve broader impact on stakeholders.
3. Big data platform for smart energy services
3.1. The methodological approach
The goal of the proposed big data platform is to unlock the
promise of big data to face today’s energy challenges and support
sustainable energy transformation towards a low carbon society.
New ways to gather and integrate the data and a blend of more
effective data analytics are proposed to provide valuable informa-
tion and new insights to stakeholders for innovative sustainable
business services. Through a blueprint for a smart energy plat-
form, we bring together a fragmented community of data, services
and stakeholders to give rise to a unified big data repository for
energy/climate research and business activities. Gathering, trans-
forming, storing, combining and analysing huge amounts of varied
information (TBs of data), several beneficiaries are expected to
significantly benefit from the analytics, insights and knowledge
offered by the platform.
• Energy Providers and Utility Companies: As the energy sector
is becoming more and more competitive, energy providers
and utilities need to offer attractive, intelligent energy ser-
vices. A rapid feedback on the value of innovative pric-
ing programs based upon customer usage patterns can be
provided, exploiting smart meter and sensor technologies,
as well as weather information, demographic data and oc-
cupants’ feedback. User-centred applications that leverage
data from smart meters into value for the buildings’ occu-
pants can change consumers’ behavioural energy efficiency
and enable intelligent home automation services. Energy
providers and utility companies can optimise their data
collection processes, reducing costs and thus offering a real
value from improved revenue recovery.
4 V. Marinakis et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems (
• ESCOs, Building Components Manufacturers, Construction
Companies, etc.: The Covenant of Mayors for Climate and En-
ergy constitutes a first-of-its-kind global initiative of cities
and towns committed transparent climate action. A num-
ber of SECAPs have been submitted in which the Covenant
signatories outline how they intend to reach their long-
term CO2 reduction target [29,30]. Moreover, EU countries
are obliged to collect EP Certificates, using different energy
assessment tools and procedures (Directive 2010/31/EU).
However, the available data are stored in disperse databases
and in multiple formats. In order to make analyses of SE-
CAP and EP Certificates data cutting across countries and
domains, a unique representation of their content is re-
quired. Integrating SECAP and EP Certificates with other
data sources (socioeconomic indicators, regulations, etc.)
advanced energy services can be provided to specific ben-
eficiaries, such as ESCOs and other energy and construction
companies, private owners, etc. For instance, manufacturers
of insulation materials might be interested to know in which
city district and/ or sector they could market their products.
• Investors and Financiers: Although several energy efficiency
initiatives can be adopted to reduce the energy use in
the long term, the scarcity of these types of invest-
ments prevents a greater allocation of resources by in-
vestors/financiers, such as commercial/green investment
banks, institutional investors and their financial advisors,
etc. The heterogeneous nature of energy efficiency projects
generally make scaling up of investments and underwriting
processes a complex exercise. The exploitation of data for
investment projects is a key enabler to build the necessary
market confidence. The availability of comparable, multi-
lingual, anonymised historical data, pooled from the major
buildings and industry market segments can encourage a
greater energy efficiency investment flow.
• Local Authorities and Other Organisations: More than other
stakeholders, the aforementioned have to address climate
challenges in a long-term plan, and become a driving force
for adoption of relative initiatives towards sustainable en-
ergy and climate planning, and promotion of environmen-
tally friendly practices. This multidisciplinary scientific field
combines the domains of environment, sociology and econ-
omy. Collecting and interrelating asymmetric data related to
the organisations’ operation and performance, their carbon
footprint can be evaluated. Moreover, an exhaustive list of
‘‘green’’ energy interventions can be provided, supporting
local authorities and other organisations to develop their
action plans.
The proposed big data platform addresses the 5 big data chal-
lenges, as follows:
• Variety: Data of different formats, types and structures
(structured, semi-structured and unstructured data) are
processed using efficient methods and tools:
◦ Real-time data generated by IoT technologies (e.g. en-
ergy consumption and energy production using smart
meters, sensor-based data).
◦ Historical data for model development and pattern
recognition (e.g. old weather data, energy costs).
◦ Open data from various sources (weather, climate, EP
Certificates, SECAPs, costs).
◦ Secondary data that are not related directly to energy
and climate (e.g. demographics, economics, cadastre).
◦ Anonymised social data (e.g. end-users’ behaviour).
Please cite this article in press as: V. Marinakis, et al., From big data to smart energy services: An application for intelligent energy management, Future Generation
Computer Systems (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.04.062.
) –
• Volume: The benefit from gathering, processing, and
analysing large volumes of data streams, existing open data
sources and other relative public repositories generates a
number of challenges in obtaining valuable knowledge for
industrial and research community.
• Velocity: Energy-related data to be fed into the platform are
both real-time (e.g. smart meters, sensors, weather, energy
costs, users’ behaviour) and static data (e.g. EP Certificates,
SECAPs, demographics, cadastre, etc.). The challenge for this
is to develop different workflows that handle each type
of data and perform similar required pre-processing action
to both of them. Moreover, the incorporation of streaming
data into analytical services along with static require special
treatment and also the combination of different streaming
endpoints creates the need for more complex data pipelines,
since the stream rate may vary from hourly data to data gen-
erated every second. In addition, the stream of data acquired
via multiple sources needs to be processed at a reasonable
speed, which means that low-latency is mandatory and this
is challenging in terms both data retrieval and processing,
when large volume of information is present.
• Veracity: Particular emphasis is laid on the diversity of
quality, accuracy and trustworthiness of the data. Initially
data that cannot be interconnected (i.e. datasets or existing
RDF repositories that use different or non-well-established
vocabularies, partially or incorrectly annotated) are brought
into the storage infrastructure of the platform, and any
sensitive data (e.g. social data) are anonymised to mitigate
privacy risks. These data go into a curation process into the
platform and a semantic enhancement that extends knowl-
edge on existing resources. Then these data resources are
linked back any existing repositories to respect the linked-
data principles.
• Value: The available data can be queried through the plat-
form, exposed through useful visualisations and real-time
APIs, as well as provide useful analytics interfaces.
3.2. High level architecture
The different structural components of the big data platform are
the following (Fig. 1):
• A Data Interoperability and Semantification Layer, The
layer at the base of the overall system is the single-entry
point for feeding all the multiple-sourced data, both open
and business, into the platform. This layer should be able
to receive and handle data of different types, from rarely
changed, static building information, to near real time
streaming sensor data or historical data, in various formats.
This by itself is a major challenge and the selection of the ap-
propriate tools heavily depends on the specific application
needs. Receiving large datasets of historical data requires a
batch execution workflow, able to handle structured data
coming from relational databases and also semi-structured
data in files like CSV, Parquet,1 ORC,2 Avro3 and NetCDF.4
Since the size of these files can make the standard file
uploading workflows inefficient, the platform should be
able to communicate with either distributed file systems,
such as Hadoop Distributed File System5 (HDFS), or cloud-
based storage systems, such as Amazon’s S3,6 Microsoft’s
1 https://parquet.apache.org/.
2 https://orc.apache.org/.
3 https://avro.apache.org/.
4 https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/.
5 https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r1.2.1/hdfs_design.html.
6 https://aws.amazon.com/s3/.
 V. Marinakis et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems (
Azure Blob Storage7 and Google’s Cloud Storage.8 As re-
gards data coming from multiple streaming endpoints, a
second workflow for their integration should be created
and several technological solutions are available, each one
having different characteristics. Apache Spark Streaming9
provides in-memory stream processing in micro-batches of
data through an application programming model. For low-
latency, in-memory processing on an already deployed clus-
ter Apache Flink10 is ideal and for complex data pipelines
Apache Storm11 and Apache Kafka12 offer great capabilities.
Apart from the ability to collect data, there is a major need
for data pre-process, cleansing and validation as an initial
step before the permanent storage. The received data, espe-
cially public open data, is probable to suffer from inconsis-
tencies, missing values, be outdated, or repeated multiple
times. Moreover, streaming data can also include inconsis-
tent values when for example a sensor malfunctions. Thus,
in order to ensure the quality and therefore the value of
the data to be finally stored, an appropriate pre-processing
pipeline should be defined, which should able to check the
completeness, the consistency and the validity of the incom-
ing data. Except for these inconsistencies, for performance
reasons and in order to succeed the desired combination
and interlinking of datasets from multiple sources, the data
need to have a common ground and that may require a
harmonisation, in terms of using common formats, same
units of measurements, or creating pre-joined files for fast
querying. In addition, depending on the data format, a de-
normalization process may also be required for structures
like the relational databases or NetCDF files, so as to trans-
form them in a flat schema, more suitable for fast queries
and analytics. For the above purposes, suitable tools exist,
i.e. OpenRefine,13 Trifacta,14 Spark Optimus15 or the Apache
Spark transformation functions16 , while custom MapRe-
duce processes on top of Hadoop can also be developed for
more specific needs.
The final step, is the data semantification, where semantics
and metadata are added to the original data, where possible.
This can be performed using well-established vocabularies
and schemata related to the domains of energy, weather
and climate, sensors network, buildings and more, along
with input from knowledge experts. Since, the process of
semantic annotation would not be efficient when applied in
very large datasets, it is proposed that the annotation should
be made on the columns of each dataset from the data
provider himself, using the API provided by the Linked Data
Vocabularies17 (LOV), store the selection in a triple-store
and then use the selected annotation automatically when
the dataset is extended. Furthermore, metadata can also be
used to better describe the datasets, using the Data Cata-
logue Vocabulary18 (DCAT) so as to enhance interoperability
between datasets and assist the selection of the suitable
7 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blobs-
introduction.
8 https://cloud.google.com/storage/.
9 https://spark.apache.org/streaming/.
10 https://flink.apache.org/.
11 http://storm.apache.org/.
12 https://kafka.apache.org/.
13 http://openrefine.org/.
14 https://www.trifacta.com/.
15 https://hioptimus.com/.
16 https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/ml-features.html#feature-transformers.
17 http://lov.okfn.org/.
18 https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/.
Please cite this article in press as: V. Marinakis, et al., From big data to smart energy services: An application for intelligent energy management, Future Generation
Computer Systems (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.04.062.
) – 5
datasets to be combined and retrieved for each of the per-
formed query. The dataset’s metadata should also include
annotation of the policy and licence type that follows each of
them and declare the owner and the access–usage rights for
the different users. The semantic enrichment and normal-
isation under the same vocabularies/terminology is going
to enable the integration and cross-examination of data
originated from different sources and provide significant
added-value on the original data, while the main challenge
is to bring together Linked Data and Big Data technologies,
in order to perform efficiently more complex queries.
• The Data Storage Cluster Utilises industry-proven dis-
tributed storage solutions to provide data storage for the
incoming data, the data generated from the services and
the semantic information and metadata. A NoSQL cluster
can be the basic storage of the original data, able to handle
both structured and unstructured types data and different
formats, such as key–value pairs or text documents. Being
suitable for big data and real-time applications, it enables
the implementation of big data analytics and operations
over large datasets effectively, with the desired speed, scal-
ability and fault-tolerance. The selection of the storage so-
lutions again significantly depends on the application. For
high availability, distributed storage Amazon Dynamo19 can
be used, or Cassandra,20 especially when similar queries are
often performed. When high availability can be sacrificed
for consistency, HBase21 can be the case, and for the storage
of mainly unstructured data and multimedia MongoDB22
is preferred. For applications that require fast search over
text documents or faceted search a full-indexed search en-
gine should be used, like Elasticsearch23 or Apache Solr.24
Nevertheless, the architectural design may not be limited to
choosing only one solution, but use two different technolo-
gies and dispatch the query execution properly, depending
on its type. For example, HBase could be used for executing
general purpose queries over files in an HDFS, while some
specific, frequently used queries could be dispatched to
Cassandra for better performance.
A Graph Database cluster is also used, as metadata reposi-
tory, to store the additional semantics and metadata of the
enriched datasets, alongside the original data. This is a vast
field of applied research and thus numerous solutions exist
to support the tones of triplified semantic data, like Amazon
Neptune,25 Virtuoso,26 Apache Jena,27 Neo4j,28 GraphDB29
and more.
• The Data Access Policy Control is responsible to isolate
data from different providers and grant access to other tools
based on data ownership and advanced user permissions. It
makes use of the annotations provided from the Data Inter-
operability and Semantification Layer about the data access
policies and licences, in order to quickly resolve conflicts
and decide who has rights to view or use the specific data.
It is a very important component when multiple datasets
19 https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/.
20 http://cassandra.apache.org/.
21 https://hbase.apache.org/.
22 https://www.mongodb.com/.
23 https://www.elastic.co/.
24 http://lucene.apache.org/solr/.
25 https://aws.amazon.com/neptune/.
26 https://virtuoso.openlinksw.com.
27 https://jena.apache.org/.
28 https://neo4j.com/.
29 http://graphdb.ontotext.com/.
6 V. Marinakis et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems (
from different providers are collected and should be com-
bined. Two main methodologies are distinguished, Role-
based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-based Access
Control (ABAC), which are both widely used. The first is
based on assigning permissions to roles and roles to users,
so only when a user has a specific role can have access to
specific datasets. ABAC is a more fine-grained methodology,
dynamic and context-aware, but more complex to imple-
ment and grants permissions to a dataset only for the users
that have some specific attributes.
• Analytics Services help beneficiaries by using data seman-
tics propose meaningful analytics, while exposing ‘‘hid-
den’’ knowledge or knowledge that general-purpose ana-
lytic tools may not easily extract in the energy domain with-
out extensive input from an experienced data analyst. For
this, a high performance, cluster computing framework that
offers the processing engine for the analysis, along with clus-
ter management and scheduling is required. Apache Spark30
is a suitable choice, which offers management for the ex-
ecution of distributed application on a cluster. It follows
the master/slave architecture along with a cluster manager,
like Hadoop YARN31 or Apache Mesos32 that support mul-
tiple data processing engines enabling Spark with extended
functionalities like enhanced resource management, fair job
scheduling and monitor tools over the cluster nodes. For
the submission of jobs to the Spark cluster, a set of tools
are available, like Apache Livy33 or Spark Job Server34 that
enable the remote submission of both batch and interactive
jobs through RESTful APIs, from multiple users that can
either have shared or separated contexts.
A rich set of specialised libraries for machine learning
(MLib35 ), graph (GraphX36 ) and stream processing (Spark
Streaming37 ) is offered by Spark through high level APIs for
Scala, Java, Python and R. By using these libraries and the ex-
ecution stack that is discussed, the analytical services can be
created, incorporating statistical and predictive models on
big and semantic data to provide deeper insights for energy
usage and more accurate forecasting results. For example,
Frequent Pattern Mining using the FP-growth algorithm
may identify unobserved patterns of energy consumption
in relation to users’ activity or weather parameters, which
can be validated from information concerning multiple dif-
ferent buildings. Another example of analytical service is to
train classification models like Random Forest or Multilayer
Perceptrons with large amounts of multi-sourced data, with
many different characteristics, in order to make them iden-
tify ‘‘abnormal’’ behaviour of how energy is consumed and
then use the trained models to identify such behaviour from
streaming data and notify the end-users or suggest actions
in real-time. Similar services can also be used for creating
a more holistic view of the energy market on the basis
of different parameters and assist in evaluating different
energy related investments or initiatives. For the selection
of data to be fed into the models, a Data Exploration Module
would allow the construction of expressive queries so as
to preview the data to be used and also use the queries
30 https://spark.apache.org/.
31 https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/current/hadoop-yarn/hadoop-yarn-
site/YARN.html.
32 http://mesos.apache.org/.
33 https://livy.incubator.apache.org/.
34 https://github.com/spark-jobserver/spark-jobserver.
35 https://spark.apache.org/mllib/.
36 https://spark.apache.org/graphx/.
37 https://spark.apache.org/streaming/.
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Computer Systems (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.04.062.
) –
to fetch the data from the storage components. The output
of the layer’s services is a set of comprehensive and user-
friendly reports, visualisations and notifications that are
appropriately distributed to the end-users.
• The Dashboard serves as a single, integrated entry point
for all the stakeholders and end-users that can use the
platform. The Dashboard is the presentation interface for
all of the provided services. It is responsible for delivering
and formatting all the required information to the users
in an effective and comprehensive way and also interact
with the back-end services, in order to handle all the user’s
actions and requests and then display the relevant con-
tent. The interface offers tools for searching and exploring
different datasets, services, and other related information.
These visualisations may vary from simple statistical charts
to map views (using leaflet.js38 ) and more, aiming to deliver
useful understanding and insights coming from the data to
the users. The Dashboard can also offer an environment to
create customised services, based on a set of available an-
alytical components implementing different statistical and
analytics algorithms, along with the functionality to perform
custom queries on the platform’s datasets. Web-based Note-
books can also be used in order to offer to the experienced
users like data analysts an environment for writing and
interactively executing Spark jobs and well-known choices
for that are Jupyter39 and Apache Zeppelin.40
4. A ‘‘data-driven’’ decision support system
This Section presents an example from the utilisation of the
above-mentioned novel approach for using multi-sourced data
within a smart city context towards the creation of energy man-
agement action plans. The added value is the ‘‘data-driven’’ DSS
that encounters the inherent barriers of the analytical, simulation
based tools, which are building/ sector specific, enabling thus the
‘‘plug in’’ of different infrastructures that generate streams of data,
their semantic modelling and further processing, through infer-
ence rules, to produce short-term actions. It enables the use of a
large amount of time-series data obtained from building energy
management and monitoring systems, which are integrated with
context data, such as weather conditions and energy prices. In
contrast with typical decision support systems, which require a
simulation model of the building to suggest decisions, the short-
term action plans suggested by the proposed approach are calcu-
lated through the forecasting of building performance in the future
based on large amounts of historical data [31].
4.1. Multi-sourced data sets
A large amounts of data are collected from five different do-
mains, including buildings’ energy profiles, weather conditions,
occupants’ feedback, renewable energy production and energy
prices). More specifically, the data captured are the following:
• Buildings’ Energy Profiles: Data regarding energy consump-
tions and indoor environment, mainly through BEMS.
• Weather Conditions: Access current weather data and fore-
casts. Moreover, weather data from control units are col-
lected.
• Occupants’ feedback: Data from building occupants acquired
through the Thermal Comfort Validator (TCV) [32] or social
media, regarding comfort aspects of the building’s occu-
pants.
38 http://leafletjs.com/.
39 http://jupyter.org/.
40 https://zeppelin.apache.org/.
 V. Marinakis et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems (
Fig. 1. The platform’s high level architecture.
• Energy production: Data regarding the renewable energy
production (photovoltaic, etc.).
• Energy prices: Data from the energy market, including elec-
tricity, oil, gas prices, etc.
4.2. Semantic modelling of data
For integrating the data from different domains, a holistic in-
teroperability solution has been implemented, based on Seman-
tic Web technologies. A data integration process is established,
which encompasses four steps: ‘‘Data Translation’’, ‘‘Data Commu-
nication’’, ‘‘Data Contextualisation’’ and ‘‘Data Storage’’ [33]. The
OPTIMUS ontology was developed, based on two already exist-
ing ontologies: Urban Energy ontology [34] and Semantic Sensor
Network ontology [35]. OPTIMUS ontology was created for all
entities that are either included or related to the smart building
environment and constitutes the main vocabulary upon which the
action plans were based. The OPTIMUS ontology has been coded in
OWL language using the ClickOn ontology editor [36].
4.3. Energy management action plans
The semantically modelled data is issued by the prediction
models and inference rules to derive the short-term actions to
improve the building’s energy performance. Four (4) prediction
models have been developed for forecasting renewable energy
production, energy consumption, indoor temperature and energy
prices. The prediction models connect the semantically integrated
data with the inference rules. They take as input both historical and
monitored data from the semantic framework in order to forecast
the building behaviour [37].
Seven (7) action plans were structured based on inference rules,
using them in order to derive suggestions for the energy man-
agers to improve the building’s performance taking into account
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) – 7
energy consumption, energy cost, carbon emissions, renewables
production and thermal comfort (Fig. 2). The action plans refer
to the energy management in buildings taking into consideration
their interaction with energy systems, they can foster efficient
management of energy flows at a broader level, integrating energy
demand, generation and data/energy infrastructures.
1. Scheduling and management of the occupancy: It aims at the
reduction of the building energy consumption by changing
the location of building occupants. In 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 [38–40]. The expected reduction of
energy consumption is estimated at 5%–9% for cooling and
2%–4% for heating [41,42].
2. Scheduling the set-point temperature: Based on the applica-
tion of two inference rules, this action plan is aimed to adjust
the indoor temperature set-point by taking into consider-
ation, respectively, thermal comfort as submitted by the
building users (using the Thermal Comfort Validator web
application), and the adaptive comfort concept [43–47]. The
target is to reduce energy use, while maintaining comfort
levels in accepted ranges. The expected reduction of energy
consumption is estimated at 5%–9% for cooling/heating [48–
50].
3. Scheduling the ON/OFF of the heating system: The action plan
concerns the optimisation of the boost time of the heating
system. The expected reduction of energy consumption is
estimated at 5%–10% for heating [51].
4. Management of the air side economiser: It involves the
scheduling of the amount of outdoor air to be used for cool-
ing the indoor environment, in order to reduce or eliminate
the need for mechanical cooling when favourable outdoor
conditions occur, using air-side economiser technology [52–
54]. The expected reduction of energy consumption is esti-
mated at 10%–20% for cooling and 5%–10% for heating [55].
8 V. Marinakis et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems (
5. 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. The
expected increase of renewable energy production is esti-
mated at 3%–8% (empirically, based on the available data
from the pilot cities).
6. Scheduling the sale/consumption of the electricity produced
through the PV system: The DSS suggests for the week ahead a
procedure which allows both to improve the exploitation of
solar energy maximising the self-consumption of electricity
produced by PV on-site and to take advantage from the
selling of the energy surplus considering the energy prices.
The expected reduction of energy cost is estimated at 5%–
10% [56].
7. Scheduling the operation of heating and electricity systems
towards energy cost Reduction: It reduces the energy cost
of the building(s) by scheduling simultaneously the oper-
ating schedule of the heating (Combined Heat and Power
(CHP) and boilers) and electricity systems (grid, PV plant
& batteries) for the upcoming week. Thus, the AP firstly
specifies based on the season (winter/summer) the schedule
of the heating/cooling systems and then suggests when the
energy generated should be used, stored or sold in order to
reduce energy cost or even make a surplus. The outcome
of the energy demand and RES prediction models, as well
as weather and energy prices forecasts, are exploited in
order to schedule the energy flows from/to the grid and the
batteries and reduce energy cost based on load shifting and
peak shaving techniques. The expected reduction of energy
cost is estimated at 5%–10% [57].
4.4. Dashboard
The DSS integrates two main interfaces, namely the ‘‘DSS man-
agement interface’’ and the ‘‘DSS end-user web interface’’ (Fig. 4).
At the start of the implementation process, the DSS should be con-
figured in order to meet the specific requirements of the end-user.
This is done by means of the DSS interfaces which are available to
the user ‘‘administrator’’ (Fig. 3).
The DSS user (energy manager, etc.) is in charge of interacting
with the DSS on a daily basis, accepting or rejecting the recom-
mendations of the DSS (Fig. 4). The DSS user is in contact with the
occupants of the buildings and receives their feedback after the
application of the measures recommended by the DSS.
5. Real life application
5.1. Selected pilot sites
The effectiveness of the DSS has been verified in the following
cities:
• The city of Savona (Italy) extends over an area of 65,5 km2
and has a population of 63.000. The municipality submitted
its SEAP to the Covenant of Mayors in July 2014. The selected
pilot sites are the following:
◦ ‘‘Colombo-Pertini’’ School: The total floor area inside
the building envelope is 6.092 m2 and includes 3 floors
and 1 basement. It is a representative of a widespread
type of public buildings. There is a PV system on the
roof with an installed power of about 20 kW.
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) –
◦ Savona Campus (belonging to the University of Genoa):
Its structure hosts typical educational buildings (of-
fices, classrooms, and laboratories), research centres,
private companies, as well as student residences
(somewhat close to residential buildings), it closely
resembles any urban district. Furthermore, a num-
ber of initiatives in the context of both ‘‘smart city’’
and ‘‘smart grid’’ concepts are being developed in the
Campus. In particular, the Smart Polygeneration Mi-
crogrid is a mixed thermal and electrical microgrid
hosting sources that contribute to satisfy the electrical
and thermal demands of the Campus. Thanks to this
infrastructure, the site can become an example of a
‘‘smart urban district’’, equipped with distributed gen-
erations, local control and supervision infrastructures.
• The city of Zaanstad (the Netherlands) has approximately
150,000 inhabitants and is part of the larger Amsterdam
metropolitan area. At 2007 the municipality has set a target
to become energy neutral at 2020. This ambition resulted
in the Integral Climate program of Zaanstad in 2009. The
Zaanstad Town Hall was selected as a pilot site. It was built
in 2011, has a floor area of 23.000 m2 and is designed as
an energy class A+ building. The Town Hall has a public
use and is also used as an office building for the employees
working at the municipality. It is a new building with a new
Building Energy Management System, sensors in every room
and flexible working desks.
• The city of Sant Cugat del Vallès is located in the re-
gion of Catalonia (Spain) approximately 20 km away from
Barcelona. The city of Sant Cugat del Vallès is a municipal-
ity of around 90.000 inhabitants. The aim of the SEAP is
to reduce the energy consumption of the municipality to
248.988 MWh and greenhouse emissions to 108.997 tCO2 .
This represents a reduction of 21% in energy consumption
and 24% of emissions with respect to the values of 2005. The
selected pilot sites are the following:
◦ Town Hall of Sant Cugat: A summary of basic data
that provide a quick overview of the building is
the following: (a) floors: 3 + 2 basements; (b) total
area: 8.593 m2 ; (c) yearly electricity consumption:
1.221.954 kWh. Moreover, there is a PV installation on
the roof of the Town Hall (17 kW), which is intercon-
nected directly to the grid.
◦ Theatre Auditori Sant Cugat: A summary of basic data
that provide a quick overview of the building is the
following: (a) floors: 2 + 1 basement + roof; (b) total
area: 4.150 m2 ; (c) yearly electricity consumption:
508.613 kWh; (d) yearly gas consumption: 698.995
kWh.
5.2. Baseline Scenario
The baseline year is 2013. In Savona Campus, Colombo-Pertini
School, Sant Cugat Theatre and Zaanstad Town Hall, the natural
gas consumption is related to the heating needs, while electricity
consumption is related to the cooling, DHW, lighting, etc. In the
Sant Cugat Town Hall, electricity is used to cover the needs for
heating, cooling, lighting, etc. A microgrid has been installed in
Savona Campus, including PV system, energy storage equipment
(battery), as well as two CHP units. PV systems have been also
installed in Colombo-Pertini School and Sant Cugat Town Hall.
Table 1 presents the baseline scenario of the pilot sites for one
year period.
 V. Marinakis et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems ( ) – 9

Fig. 2. Action plans and inference rules.

Fig. 3. Configuration of the DSS.

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10 V. Marinakis et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems ( ) –

Fig. 4. ‘‘Scheduling the operation of heating and electricity systems towards energy cost reduction’’.

Table 1
Baseline scenario, 2013 (total figures).
Savona Campus Colombo-Pertini Sant Cugat Town Hall Sant Cugat Theatre Zaanstad Town Hall Total
School
Total energy consumption (MWh/year) 2.261 625 1.222 1.208 4.435 9.751
Electricity (MWh/year) 900 42 1.222 509 2.905
Natural gas (MWh/year) 1.361 582 Not Appl . 699 1.530
Total CO2 emissions (tCO2 /year) 723 138 538 365 1.573 3.337
Electricity (tCO2 /year) 435 20 538 224 1.264
Natural gas (tCO2 /year) 289 118 Not Appl . 141 309
Total energy cost (e/year) 280.502 60.400 193.343 141.813 208.396 884.454
Electricity (e/year) 162.000 10.400 193.343 99.329 163.861
Natural gas (e/year) 118.502 50.000 Not Appl . 42.484 44.535
Energy Production (MWh/year) 668 20 22 Not Appl. Not Appl. 710
PV (MWh/year) 94 20 22
Electricity from CHP (MWh/year) 177 Not Appl. Not Appl.
Not Appl. Not Appl.
Thermal energy from CHP (MWh/year) 397

5.3. Installation and configuration 5.4. Pilot implementation and results

The use of the DSS has been related to periods different from
At the start of the pilot implementation process, the DSS was
case to case, based on the availability of the several functionalities
installed and configured to meet the specific requirements of the
in the cities. Thus:
pilot cities (Table 2). This is done by means of the DSS interfaces,
which are available to the user ‘‘administrator’’. • Sant Cugat Town Hall started using the first version of DSS
More than 440 occupants in Sant Cugat Town Hall, 300–500 in February 2016, and started monitoring the building dash-
occupants in Sant Cugat Theatre, 200–1200 occupants in Savona board in May 2016.
Campus, 20–500 occupants in Savona School and 700 occupants in • Sant Cugat Theatre started using the DSS and monitoring the
Zaanstad Town Hall interacted with the DSS. building dashboard in July 2016.

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 V. Marinakis et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems ( ) – 11

Table 2
Installation of the DSS to the pilot cities.
Sant Cugat
Data For the weather forecasting a service has
capturing been contracted with the company
TechCom S.R.L. The energy production data
capturing module has been set up to get
data from SunnyBox provider. For the data
capturing on the feedback by the occupants
two streams have been configured one for
each building. The energy prices data
capturing module has been set up to get
data from the Spanish market. The
de-centralised data capturing module has
been set up to get data from each building:
Town Hall-BEMS (Energea) and a
monitoring system (Desigo);
Theatre-Dalkia management system.
Semantic A total number of 147 streams have been
frame- set up for the Town Hall and 91 streams for
work the Theatre.
The prediction models and action plans encapsulated as Rapidminer processes have been deployed in the RapidAnalytics server.
Analytics
Each of those processes is set up in order to use the data provided by the semantic framework.
10 processes have been configured in
RapidAnalytics server.
DSS Town Hall: 15 zones and 5 action plans.
front-end Theatre: 8 zones and 2 action plans. 3
environ- virtual sensors have been created.
ments
Savona
For the weather forecasting a service
already in use at the Campus for the
management of operations of the smart
polygeneration microgrid has been offered
to DSS without additional charge. The
energy production data capturing module
has been set up to get data from a FTP
server provided by the Campus. For the
Social data capturing module two streams
have been configured one for each building.
The energy prices data capturing module
has been set up to get data from the Italian
market. The de-centralised data capturing
module has been set up to get data from
each building.
A total number of 66 streams have been set
up for the School building and 24 streams
for the Campus.
9 processes have been configured in
RapidAnalytics server.
School: 7 zones and 3 action plans.
Campus: 1 zones and 2 action plans. 8
virtual sensors have been created.
Zaanstad
The data capturing modules have been
configured to get data from Zaanstad
premises. The weather forecasting a service
has been contracted with the company
TechCom S.R.L. The energy production data
capturing module has not been installed in
this pilot. For the Social data capturing
module one streams has been configured.
The energy prices data capturing module
has not been installed in this pilot. The
de-centralised data capturing module has
been set up to get data from the pilot
building through novaPro open 2014 BEMS
and FlexWhere system.
A total number of 324 streams have been
set up for the Town Hall building.
1 prediction model encapsulated as
Rapidminer process has been deployed in
the RapidAnalytics server in order to use
the data provided by the semantic
framework.
Town Hall 34 zones and 3 Actions Plans. 3
virtual sensors have been created.

• Savona Campus started in March 2016 to use the dashboard,
whereas the AP5 has been available since April 2016 and the
AP7 since May 2016.
• Savona Colombo-Pertini School started in May 2016 to use
all the functionalities.
• Zaanstad Town Hall started to monitor the building dash-
board in March 2016, whereas the actual use of the APs is
dated 11th July 2016, after a period of adjustments to the
configuration of the BEMS started in November 2015.
Some insights per action plan during the pilot implementation
of the action plans to the three cities are summarised in Table 3.
The assessment of the impact in the application of action plans
is based on the comparison of the energy consumption before and
after their implementation (pre-action vs post-action) [58]. The
comparison is built through the real time data collection related
both to climate and users and to historical energy consumption.
The DSS implementation can achieve significant reduction of the
energy consumption, CO2 emissions and energy cost (in some
cases even beyond 20%), as well as approximately 10% increase of
renewable energy production. The impact of the DSS per pilot site
is presented in Table 4.
5.5. Future perspectives: linking DSS with the energy currency con-
cept
A future perspective is to link DSS with the energy currency con-
cept. A number of related approaches have been proposed for the
reduction of CO2 emissions, such as Ergo [59–62] and DeKo [63],
as well as for the in-feed of renewable energy, most notably So-
larCoin [64], NRGcoin [65], GENERcoin [66]. While these proposals
address environmental issues, they overlook the energy efficiency
sector. So, the connection between energy saving behaviour and a
digital currency has to be studied and formalised.
More specifically, energy end-users are able to earn coins, in
terms of digital currencies, by reducing or shifting their energy
consumption. The coins earned are related with the actual com-
pared to the predicted energy consumption and the daily amount
of energy saved by the end-user (as a result of the implementation
of the DSS action plans). The value of the coin varies among the
end-users, based on their energy profile, the savings, the hour that
these saving are achieved (increase value for the ones achieved in
peak hour) and is also determined both from the absolute savings
of the individual user and the achievements of the rest of the end-
users of the specific energy company that applies this App. For
every 1 kWh reduced, the end-user earns the respective coins,
which can be used to decrease final energy cost by paying part of
the bill or all of it to the energy company. Such an approach enables
dynamic billing and allows energy companies to incentivise end
users to follow the energy management action plans proposed.
Such an interaction can be facilitated by a blockchain based
cryptocurrency system. Blockchain is a burgeoning technology for
decentralised computation and data storage and is well known for
underpinning the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Blockchain in the energy
sector, and in the power systems especially, is a novel approach
that combines smart contracts along with the ever-expanding IoT
devices ecosystem that allows for a peer-to-peer market where
machines can buy and sell energy automatically, according to
user-defined criteria [67]. Various companies are developing such
applications although these are still in the concept or pilot phase
yet [68]. The most reputable of these projects is the so-called
Brooklyn Microgrid developed by TransactiveGrid, a joint venture
between LO3 Energy and Consensys. Others include RWE, Oneup,
Wien Energy, Electron and Vantenfall relevant projects and one
may also add SolarCoin, which is a cryptocurrency based project
where, however, the SolarCoin is created by the generation of 1
MWh of energy from photovoltaic systems [69]. Besides energy
sector, there are several relevant projects from the industry that
combine the concept of the blockchain with a wide range of indus-
tries such as finance, healthcare, real estate, the government-sector
and power systems.
The described approach is only an initial phase. The use of
blockchain technology to integrate with a community or urban

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12 V. Marinakis et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems ( ) –

Table 3
Insights per action plan during the pilot implementation.
Action plans
Scheduling and management of the
occupancy
Scheduling the set-point temperature
Scheduling the ON/OFF of the heating
system
Management of the air side economiser
Scheduling the PV maintenance
Scheduling the sale/ consumption of the
electricity produced through the PV system
Scheduling the operation of heating and
electricity systems towards energy cost
reduction
Insights
This Action Plan was selected for Zaanstad taking into consideration that the employees do not have fixed
working desks but can choose the place where they want to work. The DSS receives data from the building
and transform them into real Action Plans, namely which part of the building can be left empty on specific
days. During the implementation of the occupancy Action Plan significant reduction of energy
consumption was achieved.
The DSS user of the Zaanstad Town Hall decided that the scheduling of the set point temperature can be
carried out every day. The DSS user informed the technical end user to implement the Action Plans on the
following days till further notice. It has never led to complaints from the occupants of the building.
The Action Plan concerns the scheduling of the boost time of the heating system. The winter 2016 was
unusually hot in Sant Cugat and therefore the model based on a grey box approach that was validated
using the heating season 2015, could not be properly applied. However, through simulations it was
demonstrated that the management of the start/stop of the heating system according to the model
implemented in the DSS can potentially reduce, even if slightly, the energy consumption for space heating.
The economiser Action Plan gives the opportunity for the use of the outdoor conditions to precool the
building when the outdoor condition are in properly conditions. This kind of suggestions are highly
appreciated in the Sant Cugat Town Hall due to its potentiality to save energy for cooling. The Action Plan
suggests different schedules in order to apply total or partial free cooling depending on the indoor and
outdoor conditions. For instance, in summer time the suggestion was to supply outdoor air without
treatment from 5 am till 8 am, in order to precool the building since the outdoor temperature was low
enough.
The DSS correctly issued warnings for the PV system in the Savona Campus. For instance, during the week
20–24/6 the local control panel of the PV inverter was out of order (kept resetting) and this made the
inverter go off-line and back on-line from time to time, resulting in a loss of production. In this respect, the
energy manager contacted the inverter maintenance service to solve this malfunction.
The DSS suggests for the week ahead a procedure which allows both to improve the exploitation of solar
energy maximising the self-consumption of electricity produced by PV on-site and to take advantage from
the selling of the energy surplus considering the energy prices. The green strategy implemented in Savona
school can contribute to maximise the use the daily amount of energy from renewable sources. The data
driven models of energy generation by PV and total electrical energy demand proved to be robust to
predict the surplus of energy on the basis of the historical performance data. This rule was highly
appreciated in Savona school where electrical loads associated to the computer laboratory were selected as
the most suitable shiftable loads for exploiting the potentialities of Action Plan 6.
As far as the scheduling of sources is concerned, the power profile computed by the DSS is imposed to the
Energy Management System (EMS) of Savona Campus. For instance, the electricity storage system operates
following the scheduling suggested by the DSS. In this respect, the technician specifies the ‘‘fixed
scheduling’’ operating mode in the input file for the unit commitment module of the Campus EMS, copy
the DSS scheduling in the same input file and run the unit commitment algorithm.

Table 4
Impact of the DSS per pilot site.
Pilot Site Delivered energy Delivered energy CO2 emission Energy cost RE produced
[electricity] % [natural gas] % % % %
Savona Campus −4.0 −2.8 13.3
Savona School −5.3 −7.8 −7.3 10.2
Sant Cugat Town Hall −29.4 −29.4 −29.4 7.4
Sant Cugat Theatre −51.4 −39.0 −47.0 −48.0
Zaanstad Town Hall −23.5 −23.5 −23.5

EMS and support offers immense opportunities for time-of-use,
dynamic response systems that would allow massive integrate of
renewable energy and create a market-based mechanism to ensure
a balance between demand management, storage and load shifting
and therefore would allow the real-world, real-time application of
the Ergo concept discussed earlier. Such an implementation would
facilitate the revolutionary inversion of current energy market
mechanisms—wholesale supply of RE would be provided through
long-term stable price contracts and the retail demand would be
moderated through participation in a real-time market bidding
mechanism (with some minimum security of supply stipulations)
at the consumer level.
6. Conclusions
eficiaries (stakeholders), such as city authorities and local ad-
ministrations, energy managers and consultants, utilities and en-
ergy providers, ESCOs and other energy companies, construction
companies, building components manufacturers, investors and fi-
nanciers and other organisations and third parties.
The ‘‘data-driven’’ DSS that was developed, exploits multi-
sourced data from five different domains (weather conditions,
buildings’ energy profiles, occupants’ feedback, energy prices and
energy production), in order to make predictions of the building
energy performance and help energy managers to adopt measures
(namely short-term action plans) to improve it. The DSS has been
designed with the necessary degree of generalisation, so as to
be adapted by both public and private sector organisations, with
different characteristics, energy infrastructures, needs, priorities
and types of energy demand:

The proposed blueprint for a smart energy platform can pro-
vide data-driven innovative pathways in energy efficiency by in-
corporating novel approaches and technologies. A wide range of
data analysis techniques (including among others optimisation,
forecasting, classification and clustering) can be applied, support-
ing the design of innovative business models for several ben-
• Public sector: The proposed platform as well as the respective
DSS can support Signatories to the CoM, which want to
monitor and reduce the energy use in their buildings so
that they can effectively implement SECAPs. It has been
successfully applied in three cities (Sant Cugat, Savona and
Zaanstad), to help improving municipal buildings.

Please cite this article in press as: V. Marinakis, et al., From big data to smart energy services: An application for intelligent energy management, Future Generation
Computer Systems (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.04.062.
 V. Marinakis et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems (
• Private sector: The platform is generic enough as to be ap-
plied to other privately owned buildings (e.g. private or-
ganisations with different types of buildings, who want to
improve their energy efficiency and therefore, their energy
spending).
The added value of the proposed approach consists of correlat-
ing various types of real-time data from different sources, hence
integrating different systems, in order to optimise and achieve
sustainable energy management of the built environment. The DSS
implementation can achieve significant reduction of the energy
consumption, CO2 emissions and energy cost (in some cases even
beyond 20%), as well as approximately 10% increase of renewable
energy production. The results strongly depend on the current
status of the building, as well as the action plans which will
be implemented. More specifically, based on the available data
and infrastructure, the energy managers of the city/buildings can
decide to plug in single buildings (action plans 1–4), buildings
connected to energy production (action plans 5–6) and buildings
connected to energy production and other energy systems (action
plan 7). The DSS gives the opportunity for the development of new
action plans that integrate additional energy systems and domains
(priority areas) of the Smart Energy Cities, such as ‘‘Sustainable
Urban Mobility’’ (e.g. optimal charging scheduling of the electrical
vehicles, etc.). It can be also further upgraded integrating the
energy currency concept, in order to nudge end-users into more
efficient usage of energy consuming devices, enhance participation
and effectiveness of energy conservation actions.
Acknowledgements
The work presented is based on research conducted within
the framework of the projects ‘‘OPTIMising the energy USe in
cities with smart decision support system (OPTIMUS)’’, Euro-
pean Union Seventh Framework Programme, Greece, grant agree-
ment №608703 (http://optimus-smartcity.eu/) and ‘‘EU-GCC Clean
Energy Technology Network’’, European Commission, Greece -
FPI service contract number PI/2015/370817 (http://www.eugcc-
cleanergy.net). The authors wish to thank Alfonso Capozzoli, Alice
Gorrino and Vincenzo Corrado (Politecnico di Torino — Italy), Vic-
tor Martinez (Sant Cugat — Spain), Mansueto Rossi (UNIGE, Italy),
Pietro Pera (Savona/IPS — Italy) and Alex Beijers (Zaanstad — the
Netherlands), whose contribution, helpful remarks and fruitful
observations were invaluable for the development of this work.
The content of the paper is the sole responsibility of its authors
and does not necessary reflect the views of the EC.
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Dr. Vangelis Marinakis is an Electrical and Computer En-
gineer of the National Technical University of Athens and
holds a PhD in the research domain of decision support
systems for sustainable energy planning. His experience
and knowledge cover the fields of energy and environ-
mental/climate policy, design and implementation of re-
lated decision support systems and information technol-
ogy systems, promotion of energy efficiency/renewable
energy technologies and modern financing mechanisms,
intelligent energy management, elaboration of sustainable
energy and climate action plans, and energy corporate
responsibility of enterprises. His current research is focused on the design and de-
velopment of innovative systems and ‘IoT’ solutions for Smart Cities, using big data
Please cite this article in press as: V. Marinakis, et al., From big data to smart energy services: An application for intelligent energy management, Future Generation
Computer Systems (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.04.062.
) –
technologies and analytics. Dr. Marinakis is working for more than 10 years in the
fields of ICT, energy and climate, participating in several European (Horizon 2020,
FP7, IEE, etc.) and national projects. He has more than 45 scientific publications in
international journals and book chapters, as well as numerous announcements in
national and international conferences.
Dr. Haris Doukas is Assistant Professor in the School
of Electrical & Computer Engineering, National Technical
University of Athens, in the research domain of ‘‘Decision
Support Systems for Energy and Environmental Policy’’.
Since September 2003 is an Expert on Decision Support
for Energy Policy and Planning towards Sustainability in
the Energy Policy Unit of National Technical University
of Athens. Dr. Doukas key qualifications include among
other the decision support systems design, development &
administration (expert and multiple criteria decision sup-
port methods and systems) for the promotion of renew-
able energy sources and energy efficiency as well as for sustainable energy planning
in a local level. Dr. Doukas has more than 80 scientific publications in international
journals and more than 100 announcements in international conferences, chapters
in books etc. For his work, Dr. Doukas has received awards by the State Scholarship
Foundation (IKY), the NTUA, the AUTH the Technical Chamber of Greece (TCG) and
the Hellenic Operational Research Society (HELORS).
Ioannis Tsapelas is an Electrical and Computer Engineer
(2015) and a PhD candidate in the Decision Support Sys-
tems Laboratory of the School of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, NTUA. He also holds a MSc degree in Business
Administration (MBA) from AUEB (2017). Since 2015, he
participates in EU-funded research projects in the fields
of Big Data and Decision Support Systems (DSS), including
Big Data Ocean, AEGIS and OPTIMUS. His competencies
include collaborative software design and development,
database systems management, knowledge representa-
tion and DSS implementation. He is fluent in various pro-
gramming languages, including PHP, Python, Java, HTML, SQL, JavaScript and C,
development frameworks including Django, Symfony2, ADF and Spark, while he
develops his skills in the fields of Big Data and Business Analytics.
Dr. Spiros Mouzakitis holds a diploma of Electrical and
Computer Engineering from the National Technical Uni-
versity of Athens. In 2009, he successfully defended his
Ph.D. dissertation, entitled ‘‘A supportive framework for
the capability and interoperability assessment of SMEs for
the adoption of B2B integration systems’’. He has nine
years of industry experience in conception, analysis and
implementation of information technology systems. His
current research is focused on decision analysis in the field
of eBusiness and eGovernment, as well as optimisation
systems and algorithms, decision support systems and
enterprise interoperability. Spiros Mouzakitis has worked as a project manager and
software engineer/research analyst in more than 15 projects related to the open
governmental data, market/impact analysis in the context of ICT technologies, web
development and enterprise interoperability. Indicative projects include FP7, FP6
and FP5 research projects co-funded by the European Union, eParticipation projects
and evaluation reports of National projects.
Álvaro Sicilia, PhD, Computer Science Engineer. Coordi-
nator of the computer area of the group ARC (Architec-
ture Representation Computation). Member of the group
since 1999. Degree in Technical Engineering of Computer
Science in the School of Architecture and Engineering La
Salle in 2003 and in Higher Engineering in 2008. Later,
in 2012, he obtained the title of Master in Research in
ICT and its Management. He finished his PhD in 2016.
He has worked for two years in the professional sector
developing traceability applications. He has experience
in the representation of domains through Semantic Web
technologies: creation of ontologies, semantic data integration processes, and ex-
ploitation of semantic data. He has participated as researcher in diverse national
and European projects like BARCODE HOUSING SYSTEM, OIKODOMOS, INTUBE,
REPENER, SEMANCO, OPTIMUS, ENERSI and OPTEEMAL. The work done in these
projects is based on data management and analysis with a focus on Semantic Web
technologies.
 V. Marinakis et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems (
M.Arch. Ph.D Leandro Madrazo, Architect. Director of
research group ARC Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle
(www.salleurl.edu/sdr). He is a professor at the School of
Architecture La Salle, Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona,
where he has been head of the ARC Architecture Repre-
sentation Computation research group since its creation
in 1999. He graduated in architecture from the Universitat
Politècnica de Catalunya in 1984, and studied later as Ful-
bright scholar in the Master of Architecture programs of
Harvard University and at the University of California Los
Angeles, where he obtained the Master’s degree in 1988.
From 1990 to 1999 he carried out his teaching and research work at the Department
of Architecture and CAAD at ETH Zürich, completing his Ph.D. programme in 1995.
His research is concerned with the application of ICTs to the AEC sector, in particular
to improve energy efficiency in buildings and cities. He has coordinated the FP7
project SEMANCO, and the Lifelong Learning Programme OIKONET (www.oikonet.
org). Previously, he has been coordinator of the European programs OIKODOMOS
(www.oikodomos.org) and HOUSING@21.EU (www.housing21eu.net), coordinator
of the Spanish research projects REPENER (arc.housing.salle.url.edu/repener) and
BARCODE HOUSING SYSTEM (www.barcodehousing.net). He has published widely
in international conferences and journals on the application of ICT to architecture.
Please cite this article in press as: V. Marinakis, et al., From big data to smart energy services: An application for intelligent energy management, Future Generation
Computer Systems (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.04.062.
) – 15
Dr. Sgouris Sgouridis is an Associate Professor at Mas-
dar Institute. His current research interests focuses on
sociotechnical systems modelling including sustainable
transportation systems and sustainable energy systems
management. Dr. Sgouridis is Principal Investigator re-
searching ‘Commercial Aviation in a Carbon-Constrained
Future’ at Masdar Institute and he is co-leading the de-
velopment of the Sustainable Bioresource Projects. Prior
to his role at Masdar Institute, Dr. Sgouridis worked at
governmental and private organisations including the US
Department of Transportation, the Port Authority of Thes-
saloniki and the Hellenic Army. He holds a PhD in Engineering Systems from
MIT (2007), an MS in Technology and Policy from MIT (2005), and an MS in
Transportation from MIT (2005). Dr. Sgouridis received the Martin Fellowship for
Sustainability (2004–2005) and an award for Excellence in Academic Performance
from the Chambers of Engineers (1998 and 1999).