Regardless of whether we refer to them as metros, tubes, or subways, underground transportation systems are large energy consumers having significant impacts on energy consumption at a regional scale. One third of a network’s energy is required for operating metro station subsystems such as ventilation, vertical transportation and lightning, and pertinent surrounds. Although a relatively small percentage of energy can be saved optimally management such subsystems, a large energy saving in absolute terms can be obtained.

The objective of the SEAM4US project is to develop advanced technologies for optimal and scalable control of metro stations that will produce a 5% saving in non-traction electricity consumption in one year. In other words, the equivalent of the electricity consumed in over 700 households. The project’s main outcomes will be the creation of systems for optimized integrated energy management and the development of a decision support system to drive mid-term investments.

 SEAM4US will integrate additional energy metering and sensor-actuator networks within existing systems (e.g. surveillance, passenger information and train scheduling), by means of middleware as abstraction layer, to acquire grounded user, environmental and scheduling data. The data set will be used to update and enable a set of adaptive energy consumption and environmental models to proactively and optimally control the metro stations.

The SEAM4US Consortium consists of a large metro network operator, TMB; a major player in energy-efficient system management sector, COFELY; building and environmental physics and construction experts UNIVPM and UPC, respectively; R&D experts in middleware, FhG FIT and VTT; R&D experts in user and agent-based scheduling modelling, ALMENDE and UNIK; system integrator, CNET.