This 210-minute virtual workshop was entitled, “Data and Intelligence sharing for transforming buildings into active nodes in the future energy system“.

Buildings have been identified as a major contributor to global energy usage, driving much discussion on how to be decarbonized towards zero-energy consumption fostering emerging efforts in several domains. Moreover, the increasing growth of building Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) and smart building systems, is continuously expanding the “end” or the energy system “edge”, in terms of controllability, while increasing its operational complexity, since the amount of data (and controllable assets) is growing exponentially and “understanding” of the knowledge encapsulated in these big data streams will be critical for meeting operational requirements for high efficiency and for safeguarding business interests.

As technology advances and becomes more affordable, buildings are no longer perceived merely as depreciating assets, but are transforming themselves into smart buildings which are associated with the generation of vast amounts of data, spanning Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS), smart metering and sub-metering information (demand), IoT device information (sensing/control), distributed generation (RES), storage and electric vehicle data, altogether characterized by continuously increasing growth rate, multi-diverse spatio-temporal resolutions and huge volume. 

Such large datasets provide significant opportunities for better and more efficient performance monitoring and optimization of smart buildings by enabling better understanding and offering further insights on all aspects affecting (directly or indirectly) their operation through Advanced Big Energy Data Analytics. Nevertheless, and apart from the significant benefits expected intra-building by AI big data analytics solutions applied over smart buildings, the real value of big data produced in the built environment is hidden in the sharing of such information with the totality of the energy market actors whose operations are directly or indirectly linked to the energy performance of buildings, spanning ESCOs, Public Authorities, the Construction Industry, Distribution System Operators, District Heating Network Operators, Energy Retailers and Aggregators, among others.              

In this context, the workshop invited relevant EU-funded projects and researchers working in the intersection of big data, data analytics, data sharing and energy performance of buildings to present advanced concepts, technologies and innovative results they have achieved, focusing on the following domains:

• Data-driven monitoring and assessment of energy performance in buildings
• Big Data technologies for the managemement and processing of data generated in buildings
• Advanced AI data analytics toolkits and models/algorithms for the optimization of building energy performance
• Innovative, data (intelligence)-driven energy services for buildings and beyond.
• End-to-end data security and privacy
• Trusted data sharing of building-relevant data and new business models

The presentations, round tables, sharing of open tools and know-how provided all the participants with recommendations related to energy services to promote to the different stakeholders. Furthermore, through this workshop novel concepts, use cases and data-driven business scenarios emerged to extend the application of the participants’ work.

In this workshop, elite researchers from Horizon 2020 projects, as well as other research teams, engaged in presentations and discussions around the thematics described above, shared lessons learned from the implementation of their activities and projects and defined possible synergies and collaboration opportunities around specific topics of interest.

Workshop Agenda