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  Dr David Kidd  Applications accepted all year round  Self-Funded PhD Students Only

About the Project

There is an urgent need for organisations and places to adopt sustainable practices. ‘Smart cities’ in which technology and data are leveraged to understand and optimise infrastructure and behaviour is one approach by which places may be made more susitainable. Universities are both organisations and places that are in many ways a city microcosm. The university microcosm provides a more manageable and controllable place than urban environments in which smart city concepts and technologies can be developed, tested, and implemented.

The aim of this project is develop a set of KPIs for measuring the sustainability of universities using smart technologies and to implement one or more case studies that use smart technologies to measure sustainability and provide useful management tools. Kingston University will be the case study.

A general framework for assessing and measuring the sustainability of a university against target key performance indicators (KPI) will developed based on the UN Sustainability Goals, industry standards, academic research and the policy/recommendations of the university and other organisations, e.g. higher education bodies. The framework will evaluate sustainability of both the estate and its management and how the student body can be mobilised to transform a university. The framework will be informed and tested through practical application within Kingston University to measure how it is performing and identify and prioritise potential smart solutions.

One or more case study will evaluate the practical benefits, and technological and organisational challenges of implementing smart solutions to sustainability problems. Energy management is a likely case study as considerable data exists for buildings, their occupancy, and energy consumption, and there is a need to visualise energy consumption across the estate in space and time to manage usage to reduce energy consumption. Data is also held on waste and the green estate. Data is diverse and siloed within isolated systems. It will need to be integrated using ETL or APIs within web-based software that supports the required visualisation and analysis, most likely ArcGIS Online/Pro. The benefits, costs of the case studies and organisational transformation required will assessed through user-testing and interview.

The applicant should have, at least, an Honours Degree with a 2.1 or above (or equivalent) in Computer/Data Science or Estate/Building Management or Environmental Sustainability or similar discipline, preferably with experience of information technology applications to environmental/building management using ESRI ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online or CAD. ‘People skills’ are also beneficial as the investigator will be interviewing and working with Estates and other University employees.

 

 

Architecture, Building & Planning (3) Environmental Sciences (13) Geography (17)

References


Kifor, C. V., Olteanu, A., & Zerbes, M. (2023). Key Performance Indicators for Smart Energy Systems in Sustainable Universities. In Energies (Vol. 16, Issue 3). MDPI. https://doi.org/10.3390/en16031246
Villegas-Ch, W., Palacios-Pacheco, X., & Luján-Mora, S. (2019). Application of a smart city model to a traditional university campus with a big data architecture: A sustainable smart campus. Sustainability (Switzerland), 11(10). https://doi.org/10.3390/su11102857

 About the Project