A growing concern on the quality of urban environments has recently developed, due to the effects of pollution on human health and on socio-economic systems and particularly caused by urban production mechanisms. Emission-reducing policies and new analytical models have been increasingly used to cope with such new environmental threats. Therefore, there is the need of integratine traditional quantitative (statistical, data managing, geographical, etc.) techniques .with more complex tools, so as to provide decision makers with greater support to elaborate effective socio-environmental strategies. ECOURB research project, in which this paper is located, just deals with the identification of models to support urban environmental decisions. It is developed coherently with a general decision-support ICT-oriented architecture, through the analysis of multi-agent processes and the identification of variables, parameters, indicators useful in such system architectures. The present paper shows some results of this research project, in the building up of hybrid scenarios for the management of urban microclimates. Particularly, the reference context is represented by the management of indoor spaces in inhabited urban areas. Reflections are carried out on the case-study of public condo housing owned by the Institute of popular housing (IACP) in Bari, starting from a knowledge base collected through questionnaires. Such reflections take into particular account the role, the actions and the contributions of agent distributed in the inhabited context, in mutual, social and external relationships toward the reference physical environment (heat/cold management, urban heat islands, air quality etc.). The multi-agent approach allows the consideration of the complexity of such interactive relationships, so as to use them for the building up of social and environmental management models. Several agent types are taken into consideration, such as routinary human and artificial agents, as well as intelligent agents, so following taxonomical and logical approaches deriving from computer science and multi-agent theory. The modelling approach is characterized in the identification of single agents involved and in the definition of some logic rules of relation and behaviour. However, such model represents a preliminary study outcome, to be developed in the carrying out of the project with the extension and the deepening of the research project.

The management of indoor climate control should aim to keep the comfort conditions constant and uniform in time and space, quickly responding to any changes of the boundary conditions and considering at the same time the long-term hygrothermal behaviour of buildings. In the case of passive cooling, the management has a specific degree of difficulty, do to the fact that there are very few components on which it is possible to act for the control. Inside the reading room of the historical building of the Provincial Library "N. Bernardini" in Leece, a geothermal passive cooling system was installed. It is based on the thermal exchanges air-to-ground and blows air into the room through a displacement system. The unique active elements of the system are the fans, required to compensate for the pressure drops. On the basis of appropriate fields monitoring conducted during the exercise of the system, a strategy of activation of the system itself was result, that takes into account the external climate variations, the microclimate parameters, the indoor thermal loads, but also the large volume involved and the thermal inertia of the structure that dumps the effects of peaks in the variation of boundary conditions. Currently the control on the cooling system is achieved through traditional thermostats and hurnidostats, that detect the climate parameters and manage the activation of the fans and of the actuators for opening windows. However, there are already planned future developments that will replace this kind of control with an other one based on "complex-logics", which involves both thermal and moisture fluxes management. This new control system should work on set-points of comfort that are changeable according with the algorithms of adaptive comfort. Exploiting this new system, there will not be a single check of the benchmarks involved in the control of microclimate, but it will be obtained a management of the plant based on the mutual comparison of these parameters. The purpose is to realize a complete management in which each time there is one decisive parameter, that prevails over the others for the activation of the various plant parts; the decisive parameter will change every time according to the present situation, and will be identified by the system on the basis of proper setting entered in beforehand.

Passive cooling techniques and energy-efficient building envelope play a fundamental role in enhancing building thermal behavior and thermal comfort in Mediterranean climate. Controlled natural ventilation accounts for an appropriate strategy to achieve summer thermal comfort in residential buildings and reduce dependence on non-renewable resources. The aim of this research effort was to develop and design a natural ventilation system with combined solar chimney and sunrooms on different levels of apartment buildings. The system under study, that can be implemented in both new buildings and in refurbishment projects, seems to be an appropriate solution for night cooling in climate conditions characterized by significant daily thermal swings and low nighttime wind velocity. In the present paper the concept of the natural ventilation system is presented together with the results of the numerical simulations performed in the system design phase. The system in question has been designed for energy retrofitting purposes of an apartment building located in Putignano (40°50’57”N 17°07’21”E, h=372m a.s.l., Heating Degree Days=1716). The Dynamic Thermal Modelling and Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations performed have shown improvements in terms of summer ventilation efficiency and thermal comfort related to the system proposed: in that system solar chimney has been found to enhance natural ventilation during the night and when the inside and outside temperatures are very close to each other. The numerical simulations performed have been focused on the following: sizing of the solar chimney, definition of critical boundary conditions (e.g. due to different users behaviors), resulting technical solutions and operating strategies.

Aim of this numerical and experimental study, is to show the main critical points in the design of building integrated photovoltaic systems (BiPV) in ventilated façades. This study focused its attention on an eight-storey residential building located in Chiasso (Ticino, Switzerland), which was characterized on elevation by the use of façade BiPV. The work is focused on optimizing the energy output of the PV system and the analysis of the relative effects due to the indoor thermal comfort. The efficiency of the BiPV façade was calculated using the software PVsyst, after validation of an experimental model installed at ISAAC (CH), with particular focus to the effects of partial shading of the panels. In the second phase of the study, we analyzed the configuration of the ventilated façade and efficiency in terms of controlling the temperature of the inside surface of the building envelope and PV panels, using energy analysis in dynamic conditions shaped with the software Energy Plus. In order to increase the problems of overheating, the analysis was carried out with reference to the climatic context of the city of Bari (IT, 41°07'31'' N, 16°52'00'' E, 5 m a.s.l.).