Alessandra Parisio

Alessandra Parisio

Integrated Energy Systems (IES) are systems of interconnected electricity, gas, heating, and cooling networks, where the carriers interact and depend on one another. Beyond these core vectors, IES may also incorporate additional infrastructures, such as hydrogen, transportation and water networks, whenever sector coupling or cross-vector exchanges are relevant. Although modern cities already function as multi-energy systems, these networks are still planned and operated in isolation, which leads to inefficiencies and unused flexibility. As distributed energy resources (DERs) grow, local coupling among electricity, heating, and gas networks becomes stronger, so coordinated operation across carriers and infrastructures is essential. IES can improve efficiency, flexibility, and renewable integration, yet operation is challenging because of complex interdependencies, non-convex behaviors, and multi-scale dynamics of the energy networks. A key point that the literature often overlooks is the explicit role of network constraints and topology, which shape feasible operating regions, affect scalability, and determine how uncertainty and formal guarantees can be addressed. This review provides a first comprehensive analysis of network-aware modeling, optimization, and control methods for IES. We identify methodological limitations related to tractability, feasibility guarantees, and scalability. Building on these insights, we outline research directions that include distributed optimization with theoretical guarantees and control approaches informed by operational data. The review offers a foundation for scalable, network-aware operational frameworks for future low-carbon energy systems.

Corneliu Arsene, Alessandra Parisio

Forecasting power consumptions of integrated electrical, heat or gas network systems is essential in order to operate more efficiently the whole energy network. Multi-energy systems are increasingly seen as a key component of future energy systems, and a valuable source of flexibility, which can significantly contribute to a cleaner and more sustainable whole energy system. Therefore, there is a stringent need for developing novel and performant models for forecasting multi-energy demand of integrated energy systems, which to account for the different types of interacting energy vectors and of the coupling between them. Previous efforts in demand forecasting focused mainly on the single electrical power consumption or, more recently, on the single heat or gas power consumptions. In order to address this gap, in this paper six novel prediction models based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are developed, for either individual or joint prediction of multi-energy power consumptions: the single input/single output CNN model with determining the optimum number of epochs (CNN_1), the multiple input/single output CNN model (CNN_2), the single input/ single output CNN model with training/validation/testing datasets (CNN_3), the joint prediction CNN model (CNN_4), the multiple-building input/output CNN model (CNN_5) and the federated learning CNN model (CNN_6). All six novel CNN models are applied in a comprehensive manner on a novel integrated electrical, heat and gas network system, which only recently has started to be used for forecasting. The forecast horizon is short-term (next half an hour) and all the predictions results are evaluated in terms of the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and the Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE), while the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) is used for comparison purposes with other existent results from literature.