ENERGY AWARENESS IN THE OFFICE AND RESIDENTIAL BUILT ENVIRONMENTS: THE ECOFFICES AND ECOFAMILIES EXPERIMENTS

ABSTRACT The "Energy-efficient Smart Building" is first a Building where the energy consumption is measured (with sensors) and controlled (with monitoring systems), allowing to optimise energy demand thanks to information streams, but also a Building able to manage understanding of the users regarding their habits and living styles, adapting to their practices, and providing easily available, comprehensible and useful information for further operations through various interfaces and taking advantage of new technologies like gaming and mixed reality. This paper introduces to two projects, one completed, one ongoing: the ECOFFICES -Energy Challenge within Offices -project [1] proposed a challenge for saving energy in office buildings in the form of a game, with an energy competition between employees taking place in an office building, and combined advanced energy metering, energy awareness and benchmarking to create an incentive scheme for energy savings. The ongoing ECOFAMILIES project [2] is investigating the "energy awareness" topic in the residential sector: following a user-centered approach, participatory workshops with families are organised with the ambition to co-design user interfaces for energy tracking and efficiency improvement at home. Issues such as type of information to be displayed, usage scenarios, type of physical device, shape and interaction to be implemented, are discussed together with the project team composed by designers, sociologists, construction, energy and IT experts

REFINET: A new era for the sustainable development of Transport infrastructures networks in Europe

The main objective or the REFINET Coordination and Support Action has been about identifying research and innovation needs and supporting the mass-market deployment of existing innovative technologies, such as materials, components, systems and processes to support the modernisation of the European Transport Infrastructure using a multimodal approach to support investment decisions. To achieve its objectives, REFINET has in particular developed solutions enabling infrastructures decision-makers (e.g. Public Bodies, Ministries, the European Commission, Infrastructure Managers and Operators, etc.) to carry out an integrated evaluation, selection of projects and programs and monitoring them. This paper introduces to the main outcomes of REFINET, in particular the REFINET multi-modal transport infrastructure model, vision and Strategic Implementation Plan for research and innovation priorities.The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support of the European Commission under the H2020 programme, and are grateful to the REFINET Consortium partners, namely Fundación TECNALIA, D'Appolonia S.p.A., FEHRL, UIC, Fundación Plataforma Tecnológica Española de Construccion, DRAGADOS SA, CSTB and Ove Arup & Partners International Limited

Enhancing the Competitiveness of the European Construction Industry in the Digital Economy

Funding bodies in general, and the European Commission in particular, have for over a decade funded project centred Research and Technology Development (RTD) efforts. While these have traditionally operated in isolation with little co-operation and cross-fertilization of results, a crucial requirement has emerged, following the latest advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), to have a more concerted and co-ordinated action aiming at a better integration, standardisation, dissemination and exploitation of the results from these projects across the European regions and countries. This has been clearly identified as a key requirement within the European Information Society and Technology (IST) Programme. In that respect, based on the promising results and achievements realized by the leading Construction IT community in Europe, a cluster project involving six IST funded projects has been set-up in order to achieve a better integration of research results in the area. This project, ICCI (IST-2001-33022), is targeting a specific sector: the Construction industry, and is addressing a wide spectrum of issues ranging from ICT implementation and deployment to organizational, social, and legal aspects. The paper gives (1) a background description of the context in which ICCI operates, (2) its aims and objectives, (3) the research results achieved to date by its partners within their respective IST project, and (4) a road map identifying areas of collaboration and expected impacts in the European Construction digital economy

Building a Better Future: Major Results from the ICCI Cluster Project

To support research in the building sector and in order to help it move towards a new digital economy, the European Commission under the 5th Framework initiative, especially the IST programme, funded various RTD projects. The opportunity to bring these IST projects together was acknowledged so that stronger links can be created under a clustering umbrella and that, moreover, links of those projects with their RTD environment could be facilitated. This has been the objective of work carried out within the ICCI (IST-2001-33022) Cluster project. This paper introduces the main aims and objectives of the project, and then presents its principal outcomes. In a second part, it synthesises the underlying concepts, technology and tools that will make ICT-based Construction a reality in a near future, and gives recommended actions for the industry, the EC and the Construction ICT R&D in Europe, giving some benefit of this project experience to the three communities

Une approche ontologique pour formaliser la connaissance experte dans le modèle du contrôle de conformité en construction.

International audienceCet article présente un modèle pour le contrôle semi-automatique dela conformité d'un projet de construction par rapport aux normes du bâtiment. Les projets de construction sont décrits par des graphes RDF et les normes par des requêtes SPARQL. Notre approche se base sur l'appariement des représentations des requêtes de conformité avec celles des projets de construction, en prenant en compte des connaissances ontologiques. Elle vise à la production d'un bilan de conformité - sur la base de l'interprétation du résultat de cet appariement - qui explique les raisons éventuelles de nonconformité. L'efficacité de notre approche repose d'une part sur l'extraction des connaissances du domaine guidée par ce but spécifique de contrôle de conformité. D'autre part, notre modèle intègre des connaissances expertes sur le processus de contrôle qui prennent la forme d'une base d'annotations des requêtes de conformité et d'une organisation de la base de requêtes permettant leur ordonnancement dans le processus de contrôle

Optimized Water Demand Management Through Intelligent Sensing And Analytics: The WISDOM Approach

New business and technology platforms are required to sustainably manage urban water resources [1,2]. However, any proposed solutions must be cognisant of security, privacy and other factors that may inhibit adoption and hence impact. The FP7 WISDOM project (funded by the European Commission - GA 619795) aims to achieve a step change in water and energy savings via the integration of innovative Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) frameworks to optimize water distribution networks and to enable change in consumer behavior through innovative demand management and adaptive pricing schemes [1,2,3]. The WISDOM concept centres on the integration of water distribution, sensor monitoring and communication systems coupled with semantic modelling (using ontologies, potentially connected to BIM, to serve as intelligent linkages throughout the entire framework) and control capabilities to provide for near real-time management of urban water resources. Fundamental to this framework are the needs and operational requirements of users and stakeholders at domestic, corporate and city levels and this requires the interoperability of a number of demand and operational models, fed with data from diverse sources such as sensor networks and crowsourced information. This has implications regarding the provenance and trustworthiness of such data and how it can be used in not only the understanding of system and user behaviours, but more importantly in the real-time control of such systems. Adaptive and intelligent analytics will be used to produce decision support systems that will drive the ability to increase the variability of both supply and consumption [3]. This in turn paves the way for adaptive pricing incentives and a greater understanding of the water-energy nexus. This integration is complex and uncertain yet being typical of a cyber-physical system, and its relevance transcends the water resource management domain. The WISDOM framework will be modeled and simulated with initial testing at an experimental facility in France (AQUASIM – a full-scale test-bed facility to study sustainable water management), then deployed and evaluated in in two pilots in Cardiff (UK) and La Spezia (Italy). These demonstrators will evaluate the integrated concept providing insight for wider adoption

Une approche ontologique pour formaliser la connaissance experte dans le modèle du contrôle de conformité en construction.

International audienceCet article présente un modèle pour le contrôle semi-automatique dela conformité d'un projet de construction par rapport aux normes du bâtiment. Les projets de construction sont décrits par des graphes RDF et les normes par des requêtes SPARQL. Notre approche se base sur l'appariement des représentations des requêtes de conformité avec celles des projets de construction, en prenant en compte des connaissances ontologiques. Elle vise à la production d'un bilan de conformité - sur la base de l'interprétation du résultat de cet appariement - qui explique les raisons éventuelles de nonconformité. L'efficacité de notre approche repose d'une part sur l'extraction des connaissances du domaine guidée par ce but spécifique de contrôle de conformité. D'autre part, notre modèle intègre des connaissances expertes sur le processus de contrôle qui prennent la forme d'une base d'annotations des requêtes de conformité et d'une organisation de la base de requêtes permettant leur ordonnancement dans le processus de contrôle

Specifications par attributs semantiques pour la generation d'editeurs structures graphiques incrementaux

SIGLEINIST T 74277 / INIST-CNRS - Institut de l'Information Scientifique et TechniqueFRFranc

eWork and eBusiness in architecture, engineering and construction

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