UBITECH co-hosts (along with SUITE5) the virtual kick-off meeting (December 9-10, 2020) of the BEYOND Innovation Action, officially started on December 1st, 2020. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon 2020 Programme (Grant Agreement No. 957020) and spans on the period December 2020 – November 2023. The vision of BEYOND is to bring forward a reference Big Data Management Platform, on top of which an advanced AI analytics toolkit will be offered allowing for the delivery of derivative data and intelligence out of a blend of real-life building data and relevant data coming from external sources (batch and real-time). The Analytics Toolkit will enable the execution of a wealth of descriptive-predictive-prescriptive analytics on the basis of pre-trained algorithms focusing on Personal Analytics (consumer behaviour, comfort and flexibility profiling), Industrial Analytics (Energy Performance, Predictive Maintenance, Forecasting and Flexibility analytics), along with Edge Analytics towards intelligent real-time automated control of building assets.
The BEYOND Big data platform and AI Analytics Toolkit will be associated with novel data (intelligence) sharing mechanisms that enable the integration of value chain stakeholders (building and market actors), thus allowing the latter ones to gain the opportunity to acquire building data & advanced analytics and build their own applications and solutions, towards (i) providing innovative energy services to the building sector, while (ii) at the same time improving their business operations and increasing their business processes and operations (de-risked EPC, informed policy planning & infrastructure sizing). To achieve this degree of intelligence and optimization, BEYOND will leverage data, primary or secondarily related to the building domain, coming from diverse sources (data APIs, historical, sensor / IoT, weather and market data, the EU Building Stock Observatory, open building data hubs) integrated to the BEYOND Platform to enable data exchange in an interoperable and standards-based manner. BEYOND will be validated in 4 large-scale demonstrators (EL, ES, FI, RS) involving (i) data collection from diverse building typologies, data sources, building systems and devices, and (ii) data (intelligence) sharing with various market actors.
Within BEYOND, UBITECH undertakes the role of the overall project and consortium coordination. Moreover, UBITECH will design and deliver the Data Security Services Bundle that involves: (a) end-to-end encryption services for data assets that are ingested through the core platform or via the trusted data containers in the OPEs/SEPs, and for key sharing to authorized data consumers with active data contracts, based on hybrid techniques (taking the best of breed from Symmetric Searchable Encryption and Attribute-Based Encryption), (b) attribute-based access control policies services that formally describe the circumstances under which access requests to data assets should be granted, and are easily interpretable into policy enforcement rules, (c) protocols for remote attestation of the trusted data containers in OPEs and SEPs and the core platform, in order to establish their integrity and inherently their trustworthiness, and (d) multiple data anonymization methods for data providers to achieve the right balance in the “privacy vs utility” trade-off in their real-time and batch data streams.
In addition to this, UBITECH will implement the Building Portfolio Analysis toolbox that offers a holistic view and respective insights over highly populated building portfolios/ customers of energy retailers towards: (i) examining advanced billing concepts (e.g. dynamic electricity pricing) by segmenting, clustering and analysing consumption behaviours, inferring the elasticity of specific clusters against varying electricity pricing levels and deploying highly effective energy pricing campaigns, towards optimizing the performance of their portfolio and hedging against non-anticipated imbalances; (ii) monitoring their compliance to Energy Efficiency obligations imposed by the European Commission and adopted by the Member States and designing appropriate portfolio management/ energy efficiency strategies and campaigns to achieve the anticipated targets; and (iii) analysing spatio-temporal patterns of their portfolio, identifying trends and outliers and receiving valuable knowledge for the design and delivery of added value services per individual customer or clusters of them to satisfy their needs for energy cost reduction through targeted added-value energy service bundles (e.g. retrofitting or renovation, personalized energy efficiency guidance, energy performance certification, DR). Finally, UBITECH drives the dissemination and communication activities of BEYOND, as well as the synergies with other projects and contractors with the EC.
