Energy Awareness and the Role of “Critical Mass” In Smart Cities

A Smart City could be depicted as a place, logical and physical, in which a crowd of heterogeneous entities is related in time and space through different types of interactions. Any type of entity, whether it is a device or a person, clustered in communities, becomes a source of context-based data. Energy awareness is able to drive the process of bringing our society to limit energy waste and to optimize usage of available resources, causing a strong environmental and social impact. Then, following social network analysis methodologies related to the dynamics of complex systems, it is possible to find out, emergent and sometimes hidden new habits of electricity usage. Through an initial Critical Mass, involving a multitude of consumers, each related to more contexts, we evaluate the triggering and spreading of a collective attitude. To this aim, in this paper, we propose a novel analytical model defining a new concept of critical mass, which includes centrality measures both in a single layer and in a multilayer social network.