Publications associées à Urbio

Quantifying the Unknown: Data-Driven Approaches and Applications in Energy Systems

In light of the challenges posed by climate change and the goals of the Paris Agreement, electricity generation is shifting to a more renewable and decentralized pattern, while the operation of systems like buildings is increasingly electrified. This calls ...

EPFL2024

Reliable data-driven decision-making through optimal transport

Bahar Taskesen

Decision-making permeates every aspect of human and societal development, from individuals' daily choices to the complex decisions made by communities and institutions. Central to effective decision-making is the discipline of optimization, which seeks th ...

EPFL2024

Modeling, design and economics of PEC devices

Alexandre Dominique M. Cattry

Photo-electrochemical (PEC) devices allow for converting solar energy into chemical energy and for the production of energetically dense solar fuels. Light absorption, charge separation and transport, electrochemical reactions, and ionic transport are requ ...

EPFL2024

Distributional justice, effectiveness, and costs of current and alternative solar PV incentive schemes in Switzerland

Philippe Thalmann

Like many other countries, Switzerland offers various incentives to promote residential solar PV, but not all households have equal access to them. Using a microsimulation approach based on merged data from the Swiss Household Budget Survey and Household E ...

2024

Network time series forecasting in photovoltaics power production

Jelena Simeunovic

Accurate forecasting of photovoltaic (PV) power production is crucial for the integration of more renewable energy sources into the power grid. PV power production is highly intermittent, due to the stochastic cloud behaviour and cloud dynamics. Previous w ...

EPFL2024

Solar-assisted clean steam generator, a cleaner production approach for sustainable healthcare facilities

Fernando Porté Agel, Mohammad Jamshidmofid, Ahmad Arabkoohsar

Healthcare sector buildings, particularly hospitals, significantly contribute to global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Hospitals require a substantial amount of steam, including the essential hygienic or " clean steam, " that is currently ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2024

An explorative method to support design decisions based on carbon constraints and daylight sufficiency needs

Nazanin Rezaei Oghazi

The global construction industry contributes to 37% of carbon emissions associated to both building operations and construction. To help achieve the net-zero targets set by 2050, it is mandated to achieve a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. As we ...

EPFL2024

Tuning the Solar Performance of Building Facades through Polymer 3D Printing: Toward Bespoke Thermo-Optical Properties

Stephen William Wasilewski, Arno Schlueter

Facades are the primary interface controlling the flow of solar energy in buildings and affecting their energy balance and environmental impact. Recently, large-scale 3D printing (3DP) of translucent polymers has been explored as a technique for fabricatin ...

Wiley2023

Assessment of the technological viability of photoelectrochemical devices for oxygen and fuel production on Moon and Mars

Sophia Haussener, Byron Stuart Ross

Human deep space exploration is presented with multiple challenges, such as the reliable, efficient and sustainable operation of life support systems. The production and recycling of oxygen, carbon dioxide (CO2) and fuels are hereby key, as a resource resu ...

Nature Research2023

Building ventilation and outdoor air pollution: Implications for health, comfort and energy

Evangelos Belias

As humans spend most of their time indoors, indoor air quality (IAQ) significantly impacts their health. In parallel, building ventilation consumes significant energy, contributing to climate change. However, the relationships between the building ventilat ...

EPFL2023

Challenges and approaches in bridging the biomimicry gap in biohybrid systems of fish and robots

Vaios Papaspyros

As the field of ethology advances, especially over the past two decades, the role of animal-robot interaction tools has increasingly become essential. This importance arises from the need for controlled, repetitive, repeatable, and long-duration experiment ...

EPFL2023

Creating Trust by Abolishing Hierarchies

Mathias Josef Payer, Edouard Bugnion, Evangelos Marios Kogias, Adrien Ghosn, Charly Nicolas Lucien Castes, Neelu Shivprakash Kalani, Yuchen Qian

Software is going through a trust crisis. Privileged code is no longer trusted and processes insufficiently protect user code from unverified libraries. While usually treated separately, confidential computing and program compartmentalization are both symp ...

Association for Computing Machinery2023

OccuVAE: Integrating unsupervised occupancy inference in data-driven energy modeling for human-centric operation

Andrew James Sonta, Yufei Zhang

Data-driven building energy modeling is an emerging solution to facilitate the implementation of energy-flexible buildings. However, its black-box nature hinders interpretation, including with respect to human-building interaction. This drawback may bring ...

Association for Computing Machinery2023

Reinforcement Learning for Joint Design and Control of Battery-PV Systems

Christophe Ballif, Nicolas Würsch, Laure-Emmanuelle Perret Aebi, Marine Dominique Cauz

The decentralisation and unpredictability of new renewable energy sources require rethinking our energy system. Data-driven approaches, such as reinforcement learning (RL), have emerged as new control strategies for operating these systems, but they have n ...

2023

ROSMOSE: A Web-based Optimization Tool to Aid Decision-making for the Design and Operation of Industrial and Urban Energy Systems

François Maréchal, Daniel Alexander Florez Orrego, Meire Ellen Gorete Ribeiro Domingos, Cédric Terrier, Michel Lopez

Energy efficiency is crucial for the sustainable operation of all industrial and urban sectors. However, practicing engineers have seldom access to open-source tools that can readily evaluate and compare scenarios in terms of energy consumption, cost, and ...

2023

E-Scan: Consuming Contextual Data with Model Plugins

Anastasia Ailamaki, Viktor Sanca

Extracting value and insights from increasingly heterogeneous data sources involves multiple systems combining and consuming the data. With multi-modal and context-rich data such as strings, text, videos, or images, the problem of standardizing the data mo ...

2023

Transparent structured conductive coating for applications in smart windows

Jérémy Jacques Antonin Fleury

Solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth for a period of one hour contains more energy than that consumed by mankind over an entire year. Some of this solar energy is already collected by photovoltaic cells to cover the electricity needs of buildi ...

EPFL2023

Taking a step back from glass towers facades to make them compatible with the 2050 targets

Sergi Aguacil Moreno, Bernard Paule

Skyscrapers or glass towers are an extremely common model throughout the world. In the current context of climate change and resource depletion, we need to develop new postures towards these objects, especially for existing buildings that are becoming obso ...

2023

Seismic Testing of Adjacent Interacting Masonry Structures

Katrin Beyer, Igor Tomic, Andrea Penna

Masonry buildings form building aggregates around the world in historical centers, which developed as the layout of the city or village densified. In these aggregates, adjacent buildings can share structural walls, connected at the interfaces by interlocki ...

2023

incentive Mechanism Design for Responsible Data Governance: A Large-Scale Field Experiment

Boi Faltings, Naman Goel

A crucial building block of responsible artificial intelligence is responsible data governance, including data collection. Its importance is also underlined in the latest EU regulations. The data should be of high quality, foremost correct and representati ...

2023