This chapter describes ICT solutions for planning, maintaining and assessing urban energy systems. There is no single urban energy system, but - like the city itself - a system of sub-systems with different scales, spatially ranging from buildings to blocks, districts and to the city, temporally ranging from real time data to hourly, daily, monthly and finally annual totals. ICT support must consider these different sub-systems which makes necessary dividing the chapter into different sections. The chapter starts with framework conditions and general requirements for ICT solutions, and continues discussing urban development simulating models. Then decision support tools are described for energy supply and demand as well as for energy efficiency improvement assessment. Later further instruments for Smart Grid-, district heating- and cooling-planning, as well as demand side management are addressed. In the final section tools are discussed for building automation systems as smallest physical entity within the urban energy system.

Renewable energy sources are key enablers to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and to cope with the anthropogenic global warming. Their intermittent behaviour and limited storage capabilities present challenges to power system operators in maintaining the high level of power quality and reliability. However, the increased availability of advanced automation and communication technologies has provided new intelligent solutions to face these challenges. Previous work has presented various new methods to operate highly interconnected power grids with corresponding components in a more effective way. As a consequence of these developments the traditional power system is transformed into a cyber-physical system, a smart grid.
Previous and ongoing research activities have mainly focused on validating certain aspects of smart grids, but until now no integrated approach for analysing and evaluating complex configurations in a cyber-physical systems manner is available. This paper tackles this issue and addresses system validation approaches for smart grids. Different approaches for different stages in the design, development, and roll-out phase of smart grid solutions and components are discussed. Finally, future research directions are analysed.