A Cloud Computing Framework for Smarter District Heating Systems

Nowadays, EU is supporting various projects to motivate and support citizen's behavioral to achieve greater energy efficiency in district heating systems by taking advantage of ICT while ensuring energy savings from this new ICT-enabled solutions are greater than the cost for the provision of the services. Modern heating networks requires tools for constant monitoring and control of the network to ensure high effectiveness and reliability. Therefore, a flexible and efficient distributed data collection and storage, that operates with diverse sensors and via different types of networks is required. Moreover, such a system needs to be highly dependable, and separate parts of the system should operate even if the communication is lost. Cloud computing has an answer for this enormous network of computing resources and storage needs, since it has several good properties such as being energy saving, cost saving, agile, scalable, and flexible. In this paper, we propose a cloud computing based framework that integrates all the required advanced communication technologies to create an intelligent district heating network.