Editorial: Integration and digitalization of urban energy systems

The rapid growth and expansion of modern cities have raised new concerns about energy sustainability, motivating a profound transformation of conventional urban energy systems (Maroufkhani et al., 2022). The integrated energy system (IES) that incorporates multiple energy carriers such as electricity, heating, and natural gas, as well as various renewables, is believed to be a promising approach to ensuring efficient, reliable, and clean energy supply for citizens (Jiang et al., 2021). Emerging information technologies such as big-data analysis, edge computing, 5G, and artificial intelligence (AI) accelerate the innovations in the energy sector and make digitalized energy systems a hot topic. The combination of advanced energy and information technologies will enhance the performance of urban IES in different stages such as planning and design, energy management, operation and control (Zhang et al., 2022), system maintenance, and market trading (Lee et al., 2019).