Sustainable campus management includes energy-saving measures and waste reduction and has become important to many universities, being part of the institution’s societal responsibility. Smart energy systems (SESs), as part of campus energy management, can bring many benefits, including increased efficiency, reduced energy consumption, reduced emissions, increased reliability, and real-time control, and facilitate the integration of the renewable energy systems (RES). Despite the growing interest in energy efficiency and for the initiatives and projects to implement SESs, there are no universally accepted standards for assessing the performance of SESs, with most techniques being dedicated to subsystems. A KPI (key performance indicator) framework for evaluating the SESs’ performance from university campuses is proposed, starting from the current findings and priorities from the scientific literature, energy standards, legislation, and university rankings. The framework can support the implementation, operation, and evaluation of the SESs from university campuses, based on SES requirements and the stakeholders’ goals. Unlike previously developed solutions, the framework is focused not only on the technical side of SESs but also on the role that education, research, and innovation should have in sustainable development, making universities key contributors to achieving these goals.

Introduction: In this paper, the authors aim is to develop a conceptual model that aims to facilitate the processes of implementing sustainability and / or assessment of sustainable performance in a Higher Education Building (HEB). The conceptual model could also be used to compare two or more buildings of higher education in terms of sustainability. Methodology: The authors started the scientific research with the literature review in order to identify and analyze the most relevant aspects that are frequently assess and could influencing the components of sustainability in higher education institutions. These aspects were clustered into categories and for each of them were established objectives and key performance indicators. Results: The main results obtained were presented synthetically in graphical, tabular and mathematical manner. This way of presentation was preferred by the authors for defining and developing the proposed conceptual model. Conclusions: Finally, the authors propose a piloting of the conceptual model in order to validate it, because until now, no testing in physical circumstances of the model has been implemented, it based only on the results identified in the literature review.