Sustainable Energy Management for Underground Stations – SEAM4US

Underground transportation systems are significant energy consumers, hence even a small fraction of non-traction energy savings in underground transportation scenarios, will produce a relevant energy saving figure in absolute terms. A metro station is a very complex system. It involves, among others, multi-storey underground spaces having multifaceted thermal behaviour, e.g., intricate air exchange dynamics with the outside, heat conduction with the surrounding soil and high variable internal gains due to travelling passengers and trains.

Furthermore, a metro station is usually serviced by various equipment involving cooling, ventilation, safety and security, lighting, vertical transportation and horizontal passenger transfer, gates and selling machines, information and auxiliary systems. Control systems applied to public underground environments, like metro stations, have been traditionally based on a suboptimal homeostatic short-term feed-back mechanisms which are applied singularly to each equipment type. Recently, the availability of pervasive sensor networks, allows us to accurately monitor the indoor environment’s dynamics, and to implement complex anticipatory optimal control policies. The implementation of these optimal control policies requires the development of integrated models capable of predicting the near future behaviour of the controlled environment under specific conditions, so that the optimal solution can be sought through scenario analysis.

The objective of the SEAM4US research is the development of an advanced control system for the “Passeig De Gracia” metro station in Barcelona capable of setting up the internal environments opportunistically in the optimal way, on the basis of forecasts regarding the external environment, according to energy efficiency, comfort and regulation requirements. This application domain raises a number of issues which make the development of a station’s integrated model a challenging engineering task.

SEAM4US web site  
http://seam4us.eu/

Working Group
Alberto Giretti, Alessandro Carbonari, Massimo Vaccarini, Massimo Lemma, Berardo Naticchia, Roberta Ansuini, Roberto Larghetti, Sara Ruffini