Preface

There are arguably other research and development areas where interdisciplinarity is as important as in the Smart City domain. We are experiencing an incredible convergence of disciplines that are opening new challenges. The editors of this book had the pleasure to live this experience during to the FP7 project COOPERaTE funded by the European Commission. During 3 years, we had the chance to understand each other’s perspective, learn how to work together and how to understand each other. It is not easy to put at the same table construction engineers, electrical engineers, and IT experts but this is what a Smart City is about. We, the editors of this book, had the chance to live this incredibly stimulating experience and at the end of the project, looking back, we understood how much we learned, how much our understanding of the other sectors was grown and we thought it was worth to collect the lesson learned in a book. The world around us is also changing: when COOPERaTE started, the idea of cloud applications for energy was considered at the least exotic, today it is mainstream, just 4 years later. This book has the aspiration to formalize and describe this process. We hope the reader can, after going through this book, quickly grasp the complexity of the process and get to where we are now faster than in 3 years.