The buildings of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki are located throughout five sites in the wide area of Thessaloniki. These include a central campus (334,000 square meters), a campus in Thermi (213,000 square meters), a university farm (1,885,706 square meters), the Forestry and Natural Environment department facilities, and the School of Veterinary Medicine clinics. Several additional sites are also overseen by the university, including additional buildings in Thessaloniki and several outside the city, including archaeological excavations in Vergina, Dion, and Pella, as well as university-owned forests.
Due to the wide dispersion of the buildings, their age, and old or nonexistent energy specifications at the time they were designed, energy consumption and the corre-sponding costs are very high. During the last six years,
the A.U.Th.’s energy policy was revised, with considerable efforts toward saving energy by renovating installations and buildings, adopting energy-saving policies, and radically modernizing energy control systems.
The heating of buildings in the A.U.Th. central campus is provided through a heating distribution network. Centrally located boilers on university grounds, including one in the Polytech School that handles about 90 percent of the total capacity of the central campus, connect to the steam network with corresponding exchangers within school build-ings. University facilities management, led by Professor Xenos Thomas of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, were tasked with reducing the fuel consumption related to this heating network. As part of these efforts, including infrastructure updates to both the boilers and the heating network, the A.U.Th.’s facilities management sought HMI/SCADA software to monitor and manage the entire system.