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Smart Green Applications: from Renewable Energy Management to Intelligent Transportation Systems

A special issue of Energies (ISSN 1996-1073). This special issue belongs to the section "A: Sustainable Energy".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (27 January 2018) | Viewed by 25023

Special Issue Editors

Business School, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Interests: data science; event-linked network; Internet of things; semantic technologies; knowledge engineering; information security
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Department of Computer Science, College of Mathematics, University of Verona, Strada le Grazie 15, 37134 Verona, Italy
Interests: stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) in both finite and infinite dimensions; asymptotic expansion of finite/infinite integrals; interacting particle systems; random walk in random media; stochastic mean field games with applications in finance; time series analysis with applications in finance; machine learning and mathematical foundations of neural networks with applications in real markets
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
The Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Institute, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M, Denmark
Interests: embedded systems; drone electronics; autonomous drone navigation and landing on cables
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Department of Computer Science, University of Verona, 37129 Verona, Italy
Interests: robust control; robotics; teleoperation; networked control systems; adaptive optics

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Recent years have seen increasing interest devoted to so-called green themes, particularly, those aiming to find concrete and efficient solutions to new issues caused by the tumultuous industrial growth of emerging economies.

In such a scenario, the quest for Intelligent Transportation Systems, Smart Organization of human beings in Smart Cities, innovative ways to produce and handle energies and their consumption, particularly in relation to the necessity to trigger a real, green approaches to the global wellness of human beings, has become an inescapable goal to focus on.

These necessities have rapidly lead to the Green Smart Cities Era, where Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and transport applications are merging into the design and planning of new methods of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The latter also implies innovative ICT applications, as well as economical managing solutions, that are able to guarantee energy consumption reductions in transportation networks. The overall aim is twofold: To improve traffic network efficiency and traveler experience by enhancing safety, reducing traveling time, fuel consumption and environmental impacts through gathering, organizing, analyzing, using, and sharing traffic information, as well as to manage processes of energy production, with particular attention to the field of renewable energies, aiming, at the same time, at a drastic reduction of the financial risks involved in handling economical instruments related to the entirety of commercial life.

Such a large issue must face extremely stimulating challenges, such as:

  • Road Transportation Support (RTS) applications based on the ideas of the Internet of things, cloud computing, autonomous and self-managing transport systems, and social network concepts;

  • Real-Time ITS (RT-ITS), where efficiency, reliability, and timeliness are the main system requirements.

  • Energy Market Planning (EMP), where the reduction of travelling times, as well as the improvement of engine efficiencies, will permit drastic reductions in energy consumption;

  • Management of Energy Production (MEP), which is viewed as an innovative, as well as effective, approach to the realization of highly-efficient plants to produce energy from renewable sources, taking care, at the same time, of the optimization of traditional ones. Intimately linked to this latter challenge, is the implementation of virtuous economical ecosystems, where ad hoc financial derivatives will be developed to help to improve sustainable ways to live.

For this reason, there is a need to disseminate, streamline, and investigate research findings coming from several different application domains.

The goal of this Special Issue is to report on ideas and approaches for the design, economic planning, testing, and implementation of transportation support systems, including various transport modes, by applying innovative concepts of Green Smart Cities. This also concerns how to produce, deliver, and manage alternative energies and their financial impacts, as well as economic assets based on them.

Specific Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • major social and technological challenges in the Smart Cities Era

  • demonstration systems of innovative concept of RTS and RT-ITS

  • cost-benefit analysis of innovative concept of RTS and RT-ITS implementation

  • Platforms, methods and modelling for Advanced ITS

  • Efficient ways to produce renewable energy: Solar plants, wind fields, etc.

  • Human/machine interfaces and human behavioral challenges in an Advanced ITS

  • Big data analysis of climate time series, which are related to the production and management of renewable energies

  • ICT challenges to improve ITS systems by using new paradigms or approaches

  • vehicle-to-vehicle communications and wireless technologies in ITS applications

  • Financial management of economic assets associated with the handling of energy production/consumption:

  • potential application of Advanced ITS in:

  • multi-modal transportation;

  • road safety;

  • environmental and noise impact mitigation ;

  • traffic management;

  • transport resilience;

  • sustainability and climate change;

  • traffic lights management.

Prof. Dr. Mario Collotta
Prof. Dr. Yunchuan Sun
Prof. Dr. Luca Di Persio
Prof. Dr. Emad Samuel Malki Ebeid
Prof. Dr. Riccardo Muradore
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Energies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Intelligent Transportation System (ITS)

  • sustainability and climate change

  • smart cities

  • energy market planning

  • management of energy production

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Editorial

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3 pages, 158 KiB  
Editorial
Smart Green Applications: From Renewable Energy Management to Intelligent Transportation Systems
by Mario Collotta, Yunchuan Sun, Luca Di Persio, Emad Samuel Malki Ebeid and Riccardo Muradore
Energies 2018, 11(5), 1317; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/en11051317 - 22 May 2018
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 3164

Research

Jump to: Editorial

17 pages, 26555 KiB  
Article
The Biodiesel of Microalgae as a Solution for Diesel Demand in Iran
by Afshin Ghorbani, Mohammad Reza Rahimpour, Younes Ghasemi and Sona Raeissi
Energies 2018, 11(4), 950; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/en11040950 - 17 Apr 2018
Cited by 20 | Viewed by 5571
Abstract
Among the fossil fuels, diesel has the major share in petroleum product consumption. Diesel demand in Iran has increasingly grown due to the low price of diesel, a high subsidy, and an unsuitable consumption pattern. During 2006–2007, this growth imposed 2.2 billion liters [...] Read more.
Among the fossil fuels, diesel has the major share in petroleum product consumption. Diesel demand in Iran has increasingly grown due to the low price of diesel, a high subsidy, and an unsuitable consumption pattern. During 2006–2007, this growth imposed 2.2 billion liters of imports, which were equivalent to 7.5% of diesel production in 2007 and cost about $1.2 billion. Therefore, the government implemented fuel rationing in 2007 and a targeted subsidy law in 2010. These projects have not gained effective control of consumption due to the wide gap between the international diesel price and the domestic price. Diesel import after the implementation of fuel rationing and the targeted subsidy law in 2011 imposed 3.6 billion liters of import and cost about $2.2 billion. Therefore, the government will need fundamental strategies and policies to face and control the negative impact on the economy and the environment. Third generation fuels, biofuels, as another supplementary approach seems to have the capability to reduce the petroleum requirement. This paper investigates the potential of biodiesel as diesel alternative fuel from oil seeds and microalgae in Iran along with evaluating the policy for reducing diesel consumption. Dunaliella salina as an indigenous green microalga isolated from the Maharlu Salt Lake was cultivated in an integration of an airlift system and a raceway pond (IARWP) to prove microalgal potentials in Iran. Additionally, the natural culture medium from the Maharlu Salt Lake was utilized for Dunaliella salina in order to commercialize and reduce cultivation cost. Compared to oilseeds, microalgae because of their high lipid content have much potential to solve a fuel consumption problem. This paper found that only 21 percent of cultivable land is needed to replace the diesel currently consumed in Iran with microalgal biodiesel. Full article
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26 pages, 1862 KiB  
Article
LoRaWAN-Based Energy-Efficient Surveillance by Drones for Intelligent Transportation Systems
by Vishal Sharma, Ilsun You, Giovanni Pau, Mario Collotta, Jae Deok Lim and Jeong Nyeo Kim
Energies 2018, 11(3), 573; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/en11030573 - 06 Mar 2018
Cited by 84 | Viewed by 7011
Abstract
Urban networks aim at facilitating users for better experience and services through smart platforms such as the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). ITS focuses on information acquisition, sensing, contrivance control, data processing and forwarding to ground devices via user-specific application-interfaces. The utility of ITS [...] Read more.
Urban networks aim at facilitating users for better experience and services through smart platforms such as the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). ITS focuses on information acquisition, sensing, contrivance control, data processing and forwarding to ground devices via user-specific application-interfaces. The utility of ITS is further improved via the Internet of Things (IoT), which supports “Connectivity to All”. One of the key applications of IoT-ITS is urban surveillance. Current surveillance in IoT-ITS is performed via fixed infrastructure-based sensing applications which consume an excessive amount of energy leading to several overheads and failures in the network. Such issues can be overcome by the utilization of on-demand nodes, such as drones, etc. However, drones-assisted surveillance requires efficient communication setup as drones are battery operated and any extemporaneous maneuver during monitoring may result in loss of drone or complete failure of the network. The novelty in terms of network layout can be procured by the utilization of drones with LoRaWAN, which is the protocol designated for Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN). However, even this architectural novelty alone cannot ascertain the formation of fail-safe, highly resilient, low-overhead, and non-redundant network, which is additionally the problem considered in this paper. To resolve such problem, this paper uses drones as LoRaWAN gateway and proposes a communication strategy based on the area stress, resilient factor, and energy consumption that avail in the efficient localization, improved coverage and energy-efficient surveillance with lower overheads, lower redundancy, and almost zero-isolations. The proposed approach is numerically simulated and the results show that the proposed approach can conserve a maximum of 39.2% and a minimum of 12.6% of the total network energy along with an improvement in the area stress between 89.7% and 53.0% for varying number of drones over a fixed area. Full article
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2984 KiB  
Article
Techno-Economic Investigation of Solar Powered Electric Auto-Rickshaw for a Sustainable Transport System
by K. S. Reddy, S. Aravindhan and Tapas K. Mallick
Energies 2017, 10(6), 754; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/en10060754 - 28 May 2017
Cited by 20 | Viewed by 8076
Abstract
Technologies influencing alternative means of transportation have been expanding in recent years due to increasing urbanization and motorization. In this paper, a solar powered electric auto-rickshaw (SPEA) is designed and developed for Indian conditions. The vehicle developed is comprehensively analyzed techno-economically for its [...] Read more.
Technologies influencing alternative means of transportation have been expanding in recent years due to increasing urbanization and motorization. In this paper, a solar powered electric auto-rickshaw (SPEA) is designed and developed for Indian conditions. The vehicle developed is comprehensively analyzed techno-economically for its viability in the Indian market. The performance analysis of SPEA results in an optimal charging rate of 2 kWh per day with an average solar irradiance of 325 W/m2 on a typical sunny day. The discharging characteristics are studied based on different loading conditions. The vehicle achieved a maximum speed of 21.69 km/h with battery discharge rate of 296 W at 90 kg load and also reached a maximum discharge rate of 540 W at 390 kg loading with a maximum speed of 12.11 km/h. Environmental analysis of SPEA indicated that the yearly CO2 emissions of 1777 kg, 1987 kg and 1938 kg from using Compressed Natural Gas, Liquefied Petroleum Gas and gasoline engines respectively can be mitigated using SPEA. The financial analysis of SPEA concluded that the investor’s payback duration is 24.44% less compared to a gasoline-run vehicle. Socio-Economic analysis of SPEA discussed its significant advantages and showed 15.74% and 0.85% increase in yearly income over gasoline driven and battery driven vehicles. Full article
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