The purpose of this paper is to provide an operation-based methodology for optimum district
heating (DH) system design. The novelty is (1) analyzing long-term profiles of supply
temperature,(2) considering actual DH operational data (3) considering both environmental
and technical trends,(4) addressing the problems of detecting operational issues and
proposing new design solutions. From the methodological point of view, the assessment
methodology, that was originally defined in the statistical terms and which is able to quantify …