Following the Smart City views, citizens, policy makers and energy distribution companies need a reliable and scalable infrastructure to manage and analyse energy consumption data in a city district context. In order to move forward this view, a city district model is needed, which takes into account different datasources such as Building Information Models, Geographic Information Systems and real-time information coming from heterogeneous devices in the district. The Internet of Things paradigm is creating new business opportunities for low-cost, low-power and high-performance devices. Nevertheless, because of the "smart devices" heterogeneity, in order to provide uniform access to their functionalities, an abstract point of view is needed. Therefore, we propose an distributed software infrastructure, exploiting service-oriented middleware and ontology solutions to cope with the management, simulation and visualization of district energy data.

This work presents the developments of representing a part of the city districts of Manchester, UK and Turin, IT initiated within the FP7 DIMMER project completed in 2016 and continued in the last years by the Center of Excellence GIS of CSI Piemonte. The DIMMER system integrates BIM (building information modelling) and district level 3D models with real-time data from sensors and user feedback to analyze and correlate buildings utilization and provide real-time feedback about energy-related behaviors. The emerging standard 3D Tiles endorsed by the OGC was applied to represent CityGML data of two districts of Turin, Italy and Manchester, UK. 3D Tiles allows for a high level of detail (LOD) visualization that displays increasing detail of geometric features and their alphanumeric properties. Currently, the OGC 3D Tiles technology is mature, and the OGC CityGML specification will be soon updated to version three, with the adoption of exciting innovations like the support of time-dependent properties defined Dynamizers.

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