image1BUILDSPACE aims to support Green Deal objectives by coupling terrestrial data from buildings (collected by IoT platforms, BIM solutions and other) with aerial imaging from drones equipped with thermal cameras and location annotated data from satellite services (i.e. EGNSS and Copernicus). The BUILDSPACE platform will allow integration of these heterogeneous data and will offer a range of decision support tools (5 BUILDSPACE services (SE1-SE5) applied from building to urban scale) to the Buildings Value Chain (BVC) stakeholders (such as representatives of the construction and renovation sector, urban planners, city authorities, NGOs, SMEs in the space/building/energy industry, as well as policy makers and researchers), such as:

  • Localisation and visualisation of key parameters (urban heat island intensity, energy labelling of buildings,thermal/water leaks) at different urban        scales (building, district, city and regional scale).
  • Identification of environmental hotspots that increase pressure to local city ecosystems and raise probability fornatural disasters (such as                    flooding, fire and drought) and analyse the effects of energy and resource-efficient building and renovation processes in the city resilience profile.
  • Alerts and recommendations for action to local governments and regions (such as the support of policies for building renovation in specific                  vulnerable areas).
  • Quantification and assessment of the proposed measures in different scenarios to support informed decision making.

The proposed services will be validated and assessed in 4 pilots which European buildings and building stocks with different climate profiles. We will create a set of replication guidelines and blueprints for the adoption of the proposed applications in building resilient building stocks at large.

The above strategic objective will be articulated in five clear, measurable, realistic and achievable Objectives (O).

O1

To engage Buildings Value Chain (BVC) stakeholders in a co-creation process for the design of innovative applications to support sustainable, resilient buildings in urban environments leveraging on Copernicus and EGNSS services

Bringing together the building and urban domains’ stakeholders poses a challenge related to improving decision making, promoting policies and making the tracking of building stocks at different urban scales` smarter. BUILDSPACE will engage city and urban stakeholders in a co-creation process for the design of innovative services that assist buildings construction, renovation and resilience by analysing environmental effects at urban scale. Thus, the objective is: i) to collect and analyse the stakeholders’ needs interpreting them in potential use cases and scenarios driving the development of BUILDSPACE services; ii) to analyse the existing IT infrastructure and available data sources (including Copernicus, ECMWF data as well as IoT data available from smart city and smart buildings deployments); iii) evaluate and benchmark the advantages and challenges of using location-based services at different scales; iv) exploit EGNSS and Copernicus services; and 5) recommend policy mixes for implementation and uptake of new technologies.

O2

To build the baseline infrastructure and interoperable framework providing access to heterogeneous data sources to enable the development of location-based and remote sensing applications

BUILDSPACE will build a robust data collection and fusion infrastructure that allows real-time data communication from multiple information sources (incl. Copernicus data, EGNSS services, IoT data, sensors, etc.), allowing for cleaning and further semantic enrichment for processing. In this line, the project will build a data federation layer, that will implement data connectors to gather, standardise and make data available to application providers and external stakeholders.

O3

To develop novel services using Digital Twins to support building construction, renovation and monitoring and link them with city scale services enabling urban environment analysis, forecast and climate resilience.

The project will build novel services that enable buildings’ monitoring at different stages (construction, operation, renovation) and allow their linking to city scale services enabling analysis and prediction of urban environment considering climate change. In this line, the BUILDSPACE services will fall under the two main categories:

  • Services at building scale (SE1 & SE2): These services will enable the Digital Twins (DTs) generation of the building and its semantic enrichment          with thermography data collected by drones to support building construction (through AR/VR features of DTs at construction site) as well as                 building renovation and monitoring. The services will make use of EGNSS services for positioning DTs in the city context.
  • Services at city scale (SE3, SE4, SE5): These services relying on a mix of Copernicus and IoT data to infer visualisations related to energy demand,      urban heat and urban flood analysis and assessment at urban scales, facilitating decision making for increased resilience of building stock.

O4

To test and evaluate the services with the relevant stakeholders in 4 pilots across EU and pave the way for their exploitation and sustainability plans

BUILDSPACE will test the proposed applications in 4 pilot sites with different focus: i) Polish pilot involving a construction company (MOS) testing of services at building scale during the construction of a new building, including the DT generation service with AR/VR features at construction site and DT semantic enrichment service to test the quality of building construction; ii) Latvian pilot at the city of Riga involving the regional authority (RPR) focusing on the testing of the building energy demand forecast service at city scale and their link to DT of an existing building to facilitate building monitoring and tracking; iii) Greek pilot at the city of Piraeus involving the municipality of Piraeus (MoP) testing the urban heat analysis service at city scale and the DT generation and semantic enrichment services for identifying buildings requiring renovation and iii) Slovenian pilot at the city of Ljubljana involving a Blue-Green Infrastructure Institute (IMZI) testing the urban flood analysis service at city scale and its link to DT in an existing building.

O5

To deliver an open and transparent promotion of BUILDSPACE results through a comprehensive dissemination, communication and exploitation strategy

BUILDSPACE will leverage the piloted technological achievements and the respective business validation to nurture a high-level durable many-fold impact, which will include: (1) Innovative open cooperative business models, which leverage the design of innovative building-centred energy-enabled cross-domain services; (2) Synchronisation with Copernicus/EGNSS and potential contributions of the project to ongoing activities, such as the EC DestinE project where one of the project partners (ECWMF) is participating; (3) BUILDSPACE will also support the related EU initiatives (e.g. the EU Building Stock Observatory, JRC E3P Roadmap for whole lifecycle carbon emissions reduction). Best practices, blueprints, guidelines and road mapping for the transition to a green, digital and sustainable economy will be delivered. In this context, BUILDSPACE will define all stakeholders involved in the building value chain, andimage1 carefully design and plan dissemination, communication and industrial clustering activities, tailoring information to each stakeholder category based on the information needs of each, and the level of involvement.