Smart buildings and the smart grid

So far the worlds of building automation and power networks have co-existed electrically attached but without data interaction, with different, and sometimes divergent, goals and requirements. The smartgrid community is coping nowadays with a new phase in the deployment of its vision: the integration of smart buildings, making use of their services and advantages to enable more complex functionalities at a global level. The main objective of this paper is to review latest results of the research community of industrial electronics, whose society within the IEEE, the IES, acts as the organizer of this conference. At the conference, latest advances and developments in design, modelling, simulating and implementing tools for, or systems of, sensor and/or actuator networks with advances towards user orientation, wireless connectivity, dependability, energy efficiency, context awareness and ubiquitous computing will be presented.