Institutes & CentersInstitute for Renewable Energy - Projects - SINFONIA

SINFONIA

EU FP7 SINFONIA - Smart INitiative of cities Fully cOmmitted to iNvest In Advanced large-scaled energy solutions.

Sinfonia - A European Project

Since 2014, Sinfonia has been bringing together local stakeholders to transform Bolzano into a smarter city. The Municipality of Bolzano, the Provincial Institute for Social Housing IPES, Alperia, CasaClima and IDM - under the direction of Eurac Research – have been collaborating to reduce emissions in certain parts of the city and, to introduce new technology for monitoring and augmenting interaction with its inhabitants.

A massive energy refurbishment of five social housing complexes (two owned by the Municipality and three owned by IPES), has changed the face of certain areas in both the Don Bosco and the Aslago Oltrisarco districts. More than 300 families are now living in more comfortable apartments with a reduced impact on the environment (energy consumption has been reduced by 40-60 percent and use of renewable energy has increased by 20 percent).

Thanks to an advanced control system that reduces energy losses by up to 5%, Alperia has not only made the city's district heating network more efficient, but also tested a more sustainable power supply system for one of the two cogeneration plants in the Alperia-Ecoplus district heating plant.

The Municipality of Bolzano has distributed a network of sensors throughout the region to collect traffic and environmental data as well as new technological tools to communicate with its citizens. The screen you are reading right now is one of them.

Sinfonia's mediation has enabled Bolzano partners to experiment with innovative procedures in redevelopment and to adopt a more integrated and long-term approach in the future of the city’s decision making.

As a European project, Sinfonia's activities have not been exclusive to Bolzano and were instigated to develop good practices in two pilot cities (Bolzano and Innsbruck), to be replicable in other parts of Europe. Five other European administrations have also been involved as "early adopters", observers ready to recreate smart transformation processes in their cities too. Over the past 6 years, Sinfonia has involved 30 partners with a total budget of over 40 million Euros.

Project duration: June 2014 - June 2020
Project status:
Funding:
Cooperation (FP7 /EU funding /Project)
Total project budget: €43,182,828.00
Website: http://www.sinfonia-smartcities.eu/en/project
Institute: Institute for Renewable Energy

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Scientific Output

Via Palermo demo building after energy retrofit
Credit: Eurac Research | Ivo Corrà

Refurbishment of social housing in Bolzano as part of the SINFONIA Project.
Credit: Eurac Research | Ivo Corrà

zweiter text
Credit: Eurac Research | Ivo Corrà

solar thermal and photovoltaic panels on the roof demo building viasimilaun
Credit: Eurac Research | Ivo Corrà

Demo building Aslago street after energy retrofitting
Credit: Eurac Research | Ivo Corrà

Facciate più contemporanee, impianti solari, ascensori, serramenti e balconi nuovi. Così, grazie al progetto europeo Sinfonia, sono stati trasformati cinque complessi residenziali nella zona sud di Bolzano. La vera rivoluzione è però nascosta all'interno: teleriscaldamento, impianti geotermici, tecnologie avanzate per l'isolamento e il riscaldamento, sistemi di ventilazione meccanica sono solo alcuni degli interventi che hanno ridotto l'impatto ambientale degli edifici.

Oggi più di 300 famiglie vivono in appartamenti più confortevoli e sicuri che consumano il 50 per cento di energia in meno. Ma gli interventi del progetto europeo Sinfonia non si sono limitati all'efficientamento energetico dell'edilizia sociale. Con un investimento totale di oltre 30 milioni di euro, i partner altoatesini – Eurac Research, Comune di Bolzano, Istituto provinciale per l'edilizia sociale, Alperia e Agenzia CasaClima – hanno lavorato su molti altri fronti per avviare a Bolzano una trasformazione verso la smart city: uno sviluppo urbano basato sulle tecnologie più avanzate per creare connessioni e sinergie, migliorare il benessere dei cittadini e tutelare l'ambiente.

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Concluso il progetto europeo Sinfonia: Bolzano è più smart

Leggi il comunicato stampa - 16.09.2020

csfinesinfoniaitok.pdf
(145 KB)

Mappa degli interventi a Bolzano

Scarica la mappa

mappasinofniait.pdf
(594 KB)

Booklet - Low Carbon Cities for Better Living

Rapporto pubblico finale di progetto - luglio 2020 (in inglese) Scarica il file PDF

sinfonia-booklet-digital.pdf
(4 MB)

Factsheet - Gli interventi a Bolzano

Scarica i file pdf (in inglese)

SINFONIA Smart City talks

Serie di webinar (in inglese) Vai a YouTube

Ulteriori informazioni sul sito SINFONIA

Vai al sito di progetto

Scientific Publications

Journal article2024

A Data Filling Methodology for Time Series Based on CNN and (Bi)LSTM Neural Networks

Tzoumpas K, Estrada A, Miraglio P, Zambelli P

During data collection from sensors, several circumstances can affect their continuity and validity, resulting in alterations or loss of data. Although classical statistics methods can reasonably approximate the missing data in a time series, the recent developments in Deep Learning (DL) have given impetus to innovative and much more accurate forecasting techniques. In the present paper, we develop two DL models aimed at filling data gaps in internal temperature time series obtained from monitored apartments located in Bolzano, Italy. These models exploit both pre- and post-gap data, and a correlated time series (the external temperature) in order to predict the internal temperature. The first one consists of two twin networks, each of which is a combination of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks (LSTM), which are run in opposite directions and then combined. Our second DL model, instead, is a single network containing CNN and Bidirectional LSTM layers (BiLSTM). Both of them capture the fluctuating nature of the data and show good accuracy in reconstructing the target time series. The results they achieve, both in terms of error metrics and of R2 -score, are better than those of a simpler DL architecture proposed in the literature for a similar scope, that we take as a baseline. Comparing our two models, the CNN-BiLSTM outperforms the CNN-LSTM, indicating a more effective way of combining past and future information, which is learnt from the data, than the explicit interpolation via a sigmoid function of onward and backwards predictions.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3369891

Journal article2022

Fixed and Mobile Low-Cost Sensing Approaches for Microclimate Monitoring in Urban Areas: A Preliminary Study in the City of Bolzano (Italy)

Croce S, Tondini S

In the current scenario of massive urbanization and global climate change, an intelligent monitoring of the environmental variables is becoming fundamental to ensure good living conditions in cities. Indeed, the acquisition of data with high spatiotemporal resolution can enable the assessment of environmental vulnerabilities in urban areas towards the definition of responsive adaptation and mitigation strategies. In this context, the current work presents a two-fold approach based on low-cost cloud-connected sensors for (i) fixed and (ii) mobile monitoring of several environmental parameters. This paper, which focuses on the measurement aspects of the urban micro-climate, describes in detail the hardware and software components of both approaches, and how to exploit them for setting up a field campaign. The methods were tested in the city of Bolzano (Italy), demonstrating their suitability for identifying the spatial variability of the microclimate in relation to the urban morphology, and for highlighting the presence of the urban heat island and estimating its intensity

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advanced Geospatial Applications for Smart Cities and Knowledge Discovery from Urban Data)

DOI Source

DOI: 10.3390/smartcities5010004

Journal article2021

Tackling Energy Poverty Through Behavioral Change: a Pilot Study on Social Comparison Interventions in Social Housing Districts

Caballero N, Della Valle N

Behavioral Economics has in recent years played a key role in informing the design of non-price interventions aimed at promoting energy conservation behaviors in residential housing. Some of the most influential contributions of the discipline in an applied setting have centered around the development of norm-based interventions. The success that these interventions have had in specific contexts presents an opportunity to exploit them as tools for tackling a prevalent type of poverty at the EU level: energy poverty. Recent contributions to the literature highlight the role of inefficient energy behavior as a significant driver of this particular type of poverty, which is characterized by an inability to afford the basic energy services necessary to guarantee a decent standard of living. Therefore, the effectiveness of norm-basedinterventions in vulnerable populations merits further investigation to determine whether this approach can suitably address the behavioral components of energy poverty by promoting efficient energy consumption and conservation efforts. This study reports on a pilot conducted in an exemplary social housing context (located in Bolzano, Italy) with the aim to assess the effectiveness of social comparison interventions in energy vulnerable groups. Our investigated cohort covers an initial small sample of apartments with a large representatives of elderly individuals and other energy-vulnerable groups. Using a design that combines appeals to injunctive and descriptive norms embedded within In-Home Devices (IHD) in recently retrofitted homes, our objective is to set a basis for the assessment of effectiveness of these types ofmethodological insights to policy makers on how to effectively design behaviorally informed interventions aimed at tackling energy poverty. Despite the current data limitations, our results do seem to suggest that uniformly applied norm-based interventions may have potentially backfiring effects in small-scale implementations. Therefore, they suggest that attention needs to be paid to household composition and pre-existing levels of consumption, when designing behavior-change interventions in these groups

DOI Source

DOI: 10.3389/frsc.2020.601095

Journal article2020

Assessing Multiple Benefits of Housing Regeneration and Smart City Development: The European Project SINFONIA

Bisello A

Adriano Bisello

The urban energy transition towards more sustainable energy production and consumption systems is at the top of the European Union political agenda. Several demonstration projects are dealing with the deep-energy retrofit of real-estate assets to show how technological and societal innovation can provide new investment opportunities while enhancing citizens’ quality of life by delivering multiple benefits. In this framework, the EU smart city project SINFONIA has developed and tested a new comprehensive framework to define, identify, and evaluate the main multiple benefits expected from similar initiatives. The present contribution reviews the three assessment exercises carried out in the lighthouse city of Bolzano during the project execution, consisting of an investigation of the users’ stated preferences, an evaluation of consumers‘ revealed preferences and a multicriteria analysis of homeowners’ priorities. It offers an overview of the main achievements and sheds light on further investigatory paths applicable to Positive Energy Districts assessment.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.3390/su12198038

All Publications

A Data Filling Methodology for Time Series Based on CNN and (Bi)LSTM Neural Networks
Tzoumpas K, Estrada A, Miraglio P, Zambelli P (2024)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Journal article
IEEE Access

More information: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/access.2024.3369891

https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3369891

Fixed and Mobile Low-Cost Sensing Approaches for Microclimate Monitoring in Urban Areas: A Preliminary Study in the City of Bolzano (Italy)
Croce S, Tondini S (2022)
MDPI AG
Journal article
Smart Cities

More information: http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/smartcities5010004

https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities5010004

https://hdl.handle.net/10863/20038

Il comfort? È una Sinfonia
Ciolli V (2022)
Journal article
Condominio Sostenibile e Certificato

More information: https://www.youtradeweb.com/2022/06/condominio-maggio-2022/

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City of Innsbruck

Neue Heimat Tirol, Gemeinnützige WohnungsGmbH

TECHNOFI SA

Municipality of La Rochelle

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Südtiroler Elektrizitätsaktiengesellschaft

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Municipality of Boras

Empresas Municipales de Sevilla

Centre National d'Expertise de l'Enveloppe et de la Structure

Standortagentur Tirol, Tiroler Zukunftsstiftung

Institut für den Sozialen Wohnbau des Landes Südtirol

SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden

Liebherr-Hausgeräte Lienz GmbH

Universität Innsbruck, Fakultät für Bildungswissenschaften, Institut für Erziehungswissenschaft

Stadt Rosenheim

ZABALA INNOVATION CONSULTING, S.A.

Greenovate! Europe EEIG

Climate House Agency

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Journal article2021

Tackling Energy Poverty Through Behavioral Change: a Pilot Study on Social Comparison Interventions in Social Housing Districts

Caballero N, Della Valle N

DOI Source

DOI: 10.3389/frsc.2020.601095

SINFONIA