New project MODERATE

The spread of building monitoring and control systems has led to a large accumulation of data and consequently to the need for shared and secure data management and consultation for the entire construction sector. However, this interoperability is often undermined by the diversity of the various systems in use, as well as by the rules protecting privacy.

It is exactly on this issue that the new Horizon Europe-funded project MODERATE (Marketable Open Data Solutions for Optimised Building-Related Energy Services) GA101069834 fits in. The 4-year, more than EUR 5 million project will be co-ordinated by Eurac Research's Institute for Renewable Energy, which will collaborate with 16 other partners from European countries, including Austria, Germany, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands. The project will be officially presented the next 21 and 22 June at the NOI Techpark in Bolzano.

The aim of the project is to formalise a set of procedures and techniques that will enable all stakeholders - building owners, policy makers, facility managers, service companies - to openly share their data, obtain insights and make decisions in compliance with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It will also allow uniform access to heterogeneous building performance data sources, usually dispersed in different, non-interoperable databases. MODERATE will develop an open platform for this purpose, making use of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and the internet of things (IoT). This platform will enable its users to analyse real-time data from various building systems and provide information on the multiple dimensions of a building's performance. The use of synthetic generation data will be one of the keys to realising open data sharing, enabling more reliable services and generating business opportunities.

The role of Eurac Research, in addition to the scientific, administrative, financial and legal co-ordination of the consortium will be to co-ordinate the management and collection of data by making important contributions to the development of data services and analysis. In particular, advanced data anonymisation and synthesis techniques will be applied.

"One of the main outputs of MODERATE will be a software platform for open dataset sharing and analysis. The platform will be developed by the partner CTIC and released under a commercial friendly open source licence," explains Manuel Mauro, Eurac Research researcher and scientific coordinator of the project. "The aspect that will distinguish the project will be the uncompromising open science approach: The developed software will be released under open source licences, the collected datasets will be properly anonymised and released under open data licences, and all scientific publications will be published in open access journals and conferences."

Compared to other previous studies and initiatives on the definition of a modular data architecture, MODERATE thus sets itself the ambitious goal of creating a completely open platform where research results - not only data but also programmes, algorithms, etc. - can be used by everyone, not only by the scientific partners, so that even the data owners themselves can know the extent of the data and profit from it economically.