TIPS4PED will design, develop, and test in a relevant environment the effectiveness and the techno-economic viability of a Digital Twin based Platform, to support municipalities in the implementation of Positive Energy Districts. The TIPS4PED Platform will be able to support municipalities in the decision-making delivering a series of evidence-based results, increasing the environmental sustainability of cities, and reducing operational costs. The project will adopt a people-centric approach, which aims at engage, train and empower citizens and potential stakeholders. TIPS4PED will do this by leveraging on consortium knowledge and prior EU experience and being motivated by the goals set forth by the European Commission. To design and manage the PED effectively and foster its implementation through city planning actions, different modules will be made available on the Integrated Assessment Platform, to support municipalities from the technical perspective, as well as the social, financial, regulatory and administrative ones. The tools will be developed thanks to a end-users co-design approach, capable of providing constant feedback to the software development process. The TIPS4PED solutions will be tested in one LightHouse city (Turin), where the IAP will be connected to a sensoring system for the realtime management of the assets, and replication studies will be conducted in three Follower Cities (Cork, Kozani and Budapest). The testing and replication phase willl result in the creation of 4 cities Digital Twins and decarbonization roadmaps. TIPS4PED seeks to suggest scalable and easily reproducible technologies and digital optimization as a key solution for to achieve 2030 EU goals, while taking into consideration various market circumstances, and environmental, safety, and regulatory aspects.

EU-DREAM brings together a group of preeminent energy industry and research partners focused on accelerating innovation in digital tools and promoting the effective uptake of digital services. EU-DREAM is aligned with the EU Action Plan on the Digitalisation of the Energy System as it proposes to develop the next generation of energy services, solutions and products that really work for energy consumers, fully tested and demonstrated in 6 LLs in 6 EU countries (Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Denmark). EU-DREAM will address the barriers, motivations, and drivers from the consumer’s perspective, intertwining the new technological developments with SSH expertise. All EU-DREAM technical solutions will produce high-level TRL 6-7 results by the end of the project.

The construction sector is responsible for over 35% of the EU’s total waste generation, and accounts for about 50% of all extracted resources and an estimated at 5-12% of total GHG emissions. WOODCIRCLES will contribute significantly to decreasing these numbers by developing innovative circular solutions for sustainable wood construction to help reduce Europe’s dependence on non-renewable resources, cut GHG emissions, reduce waste generation, and offer long-term carbon sinks and substitution of fossil-based and carbon-intensive products. WOODCIRCLES will combine the considerable innovation power of the expert consortium consisting of key stakeholders from all parts of the value chain to release the full circular and sustainable potential of wood construction. Based on identified needs and market potentials, the consortium will develop new value-added value chains for upcycling of wood waste materials and optimized design-for-disassembly building system solutions to significantly increase recycling rates of wood in construction. An ‘Urban Sawmill’ sorting and production facility capable of turning in-homogenous low value wood construction waste into a standardized homogenous value-added, cost-effective baseline product, will be prototyped. WOODCIRCLES will integrate digital tools and solutions in all developments and create digital twins for the large-scale, real-life demonstrators – the Urban Sawmill and the building system prototypes to demonstrate the benefits of digital technology for circular construction. Active involvement of partner cities and their building ecosystems through technical and thematic co-engagement activities will increase deployment. All developed materials, components and system prototypes will be demonstrated, piloted and fully documented – including sustainability assessment – for immediate market uptake. Based on developments, recommendations for new or updated European harmonised technical specifications and Eurocodes will be provided.

The fast and cost-efficient detection of pathogens is highly important in many sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, and food industry. However, current technologies are limited, and significant advances are required to develop low-cost (<10€) detection assays that can detect a few bacterial cells (<10 cells/ml) within less than one hour. In the FET-Open project MARA, which is the basis for MARILIA, we have developed novel technologies and tools that have a high exploitation potential. Thus, we have initiated the follow-up project MARILIA, which aims to exploit these results and realise a new detection concept for the fast, low-cost identification of human pathogens in water samples. In MARILIA, we will increase the technology readiness level (TRL) of our novel detection concept from TRL 2 to TRL 5. A well-balanced consortium has been established, comprising an applied research institute as coordinator (AIT, coordinated also the MARA project), a university (UZ), a basic research institute (RBI), an SME (D1, acting as business incubator) and a large company (IREN, representing a potential future customer). If the MARILIA detection assay meets the requirements defined by IREN, a start-up will be founded to commercially exploit the innovations in the post-project phase.