SMART CAMPUS

This project aims at the development of a platform on a service building that integrates real time information systems and automatic energy management systems that is able to execute this bi-directional learning process such that the user learns how to interact with the building and the building learns how to interact with the human in a more energy efficient way.

The project will demonstrate the substantial Energy Savings up to 20% of total saving, being up to 15% the result of consumer behavior transformation. We are targeting Public buildings (Universities) through the use of Services enabled by ICT in particular by supporting the user behavior transformation through the interaction of the user with the building intelligent energy management system. Furthermore the eco-conscious educated user will be empowered with real time ubiquitous information and decision making guidance that will enable and motivate the interaction leading to Energy Efficiency.

The users will be addressed at 4 public Universities located at Helsinki, Lulea, Lisbon and Milan.

 

The service will be used to educate, influence and transform the user energy consumption behavior sustaining these behavioral changes by his/her empowerment with real time interactive information and guided/influenced decision making. The service provided will be based on a reference of best practices in terms of energy usage but will also take into account the user preferences, balancing the pre-set definitions with the user preferences, having therefore a bidirectional learning process between the building and the users.

CITY SDK

The objective of this project is to produce three large-scale pan-European smart city service pilots in the eight partner cities. The pilots are in the domains of smart mobility, smart participation and smart tourism. A combination of city organizations’ leadership, collaboration between the cities, and a large amount of partners’ relevant existing services, interfaces, software, practices and standards in these domains are the key enabler for this broad approach. For effectiveness within the project, but even more so for the impact beyond the project pilots, we will package selected prior assets and the project pilot deliverables into a shared, uniform, open source City Service Development Kit – CitySDK.

CitySDK is aimed for further developers to use, either in the partner cities or in new cities. With this we wish to enhance the development and innovation capability and between-city transfer possibilities of European Smart City Applications. During the project we will engage a vast number of citizens and developers to further exploit the CitySDK. As the pilots are run by the cities and their domains are much in the daily lives of the citizens, the project foresees to reach a total coverage of 31 million people, with up to 0,5 million active real people-users, engage up to 1.000 new developer SMEs in 8 countries, and build a self-sustaining, thriving smart city application ecosystem that lives well beyond the project funding. The consortium aims to contribute substantially to the creation of a single European market for technologically convergent smart city applications, in order to reduce the European internal single market gap against North America and the ubiquitous computing technology gap against some Asian countries.

 

IST participates in the implementation of the Lisbon pilot together with the municipality.

POLYGENERATION

Natural and manmade disasters result in emergency situations with many helpless people each year. Providing energy solutions in these emergency situations is a challenging task. This project envisions to design an Emergency Energy Module (EEM) which will be fuel flexible, reliable, cost effective, easy to transport and simple in operation and maintenance fulfilling the basic energy-related needs of people and relief aid units in emergency situations.

 

While at KTH, the container design is focusing mostly on combined heat and power generation, the container at IST is focusing on the production of electricity using renewable resources. Since May23rd 2012, the container is operating in Tagus camp, supplying the electricity used by the Laboratory for Energy in Buildings (LEB), part of the SMARTTAGUS project.

NETZEROSCHOOL

This project proposes to build a reference case-study, with an international scope, about energy efficiency strategies and sustainability goals at schools and its impact on energy consumption by local communities. The study fosters alternative sustainable living scenarios, and develops comprehensive guidelines about the key strategic aspects to promote patterns of behavioral change, building upon the strengths of recent National and Community Policies. It involves a school and its families, as well as the relation between them, and focuses on two research vectors: behavioral and technological. At residential level, the study sets a reference about the willingness to accept a level of explicitly informed energy home automation by the families involved, as well as the dynamic interaction level of the residents. This information is instrumental for the design of larger scale experiments focusing on the refinement of energy services.

 

 

The interdisciplinary nature of the team assembled (IST, LNEC and ICS-UL) is explained by the complexity and diversity of the problem at hands that underlies a significant social dimension usually underestimated in energy studies.  A key component to the study will be the communication strategy. The strategy will convey the information about the impact of each intervention on energy consumption. At residential level, the experiment is oriented to monitor the families’ response in relation to the energy efficiency action plan presented in school. 

OFFSHORE ENERGY ROADMAP

The objective of this project is to bring an engineering systems approach to the development of a novel design methodology of roadmaps of renewable and clean energy systems that includes uncertainty management, monitoring an update tools. This requires the definition of a holistic methodology that combines engineering approaches, such as systems modeling and optimization with social sciences methodologies for forecasting. The team is composed by IDMEC, WAVEC, LNEG and CEETA-ECO with technical expertise in offshore energies, clean energies and social and economic sciences. The methodology will be applied to a case study of great relevance for Portuguese social and economic development, which is the development of a Portuguese roadmap for the offshore energies.

NODES

Uncertainty management is critical in the design of complex systems like energy networks. As these systems feature long lifecycles and interactions among multiple social and technical aspects, uncertainties can be very large and arise from multiple sources. Flexible design is a proactive approach to deal with uncertainty, which enables a system to easily adapt to changing future conditions. The developments to date of this approach have clearly demonstrated: the ability of flexibility, in particular operational flexibility, to increase expected system value; the usefulness of screening models to explore very large design spaces, arising from including stochastic elements over time; the appropriateness of multidimensional measures for appraisal of system designs.

 

The flexibility approach has focused mostly on individual projects, such as oil platforms or buildings. Its extension to networks would be of great interest as networks greatly increase design complexity, due to their combinatorial nature and features such as decentralized decision or multi-commodity flows. This is particularly true in the design of regional or national energy networks. Network design under uncertainty has received some attention in the operations management literature, mostly from analytical or mathematical programming approaches, focusing on expected performance.  The operations management literature has also looked at decentralized decisions in processing networks, mainly through game-theoretic and agent-based frameworks that handle interactions, but mostly ignore complexity in individual behavior

 

 

The integration of these two perspectives with the flexible design approach, and a focus on exploring operating flexibility, are the strategic enablers for the success in meeting this project’s major challenge: extending the success so far of the flexible design approach into networked systems. This project will have two major contributions: providing efficient ways to model and explore complex design spaces for networked engineering systems; improving the possibilities of energy development for energy policy design projects.