REGEN will pave innovative pathways for the decarbonisation of European neighbourhoods and cities, tackling urgent socioeconomic, climate and built environment challenges by designing a multifaceted Toolbox leveraging cutting-edge digital technologies and life cycle sustainability assessments while engaging citizens and influencing behavioural change. The proposed holistic methodology and framework (Assessment Framework for Urban Regeneration) will validate a catalogue of 50 urban regeneration interventions. This framework will be able to estimate the current revitalisation potential of urban infrastructure, with monitoring using digital twins and evaluation based on sustainability methodologies, facilitating the benchmarking and selection of appropriate intervention strategies. Additionally, the REGEN solutions will be applied with the end-users and all stakeholders in mind, being complemented by social and humanities studies, citizen science, participative design approaches and living labs. The indicators chosen for the assessments will rely on proven life cycle methods, extended to social and economic impacts. This will achieve a holistic sustainability approach, with the end-user being an active participant in the evaluation and validation. REGEN will apply this in 4 demonstration sites where individual buildings, streets and districts are to be constantly monitored for their energy, mobility and circularity. The net benefits of applied interventions will be monitored and assessed on an individual basis. The results will be upscaled at city level, informing key policy orientations already in place and paving the way for broader deployment. An additional 10 virtual regeneration projects will be used to replicate the regeneration interventions and assess their applicability across the EU. This will strengthen the credibility of the interventions catalogue and provide indispensable for knowledge transfer on delivering resilient urban regeneration.

PHOENIX aims at changing the role of buildings from unorganised energy consumers to active agents orchestrating and optimising their energy consumption, production and storage, with the goal of increasing energy performance, maximising occupants’ benefit, and facilitating grid operation. The project will design a portfolio of ICT solutions covering all aspects from hardware and software upgrades needed in legacy equipment and optimal deployment of sensors, to data analytics and services for both building users and energy utilities. PHOENIX will take advantage of artificial intelligence technologies, as well as edge/cloud computing methods, to provide the highest level of smartness to existing buildings. The tools that will result from the different work packages will offer the possibility of establishing a new framework that will enable the optimisation of the energy use and infrastructure exploitation, while at the same time facilitate the creation of new SMEs and Start-Up ideas to exploit new revenue streams and business opportunities. To achieve this ambitious goal, PHOENIX relies on a consortium which has the technological knowledge and expertise to understand the social and technical requirements and translate them into ICT innovations (i.e. IoT, AI and Data Analytics) for the integration and smartness upgrading of existing buildings with legacy equipment and systems. To demonstrate the real impact and replicability, the proposed solution with ICT innovations and cost-effective services will be validated in 5 different pilots at European level (i.e. Ireland, Greece, Sweden and Spain). Moreover, the consortia have high expertise and business capacities to disseminate and exploit the PHOENIX results. PHOENIX will provide a portfolio of ICT solutions to increase the smartness of legacy systems and appliances in existing buildings which will increase the SRI of existing buildings. These improvements will translate in human-centric new services.

As occupant behaviour can be considered as one of the main drivers of the performance gap, TOPAs will focus on reducing the gap from an operational perspective, hence supporting Post Occupancy Evaluation. Quantifying the performance gap is non-trivial, the performance gap is dependent on time and contextual factors, and individual buildings will have a particular performance gap. The delivery of energy efficiency projects through energy performance contracts and ESCOs is widely seen as a way of addressing sub-optimal post installation performance of energy efficiency technologies. Since this model is very attractive from many perspectives and is identified as a central route to delivery of energy efficiency gains in the EPBD, methods and models for the accurate measurement and verification of energy savings are essential to the growth of the ESCO market. The energy audit process is generally done for a fixed duration at a specific point in time. A key outcome is the identification and root cause analysis of energy inefficiencies and as a result a plan is put in place to minimise these inefficiencies. This can be very effective at reducing energy consumption in a building. However, from an implementation perspective, it can be difficult to identify all issues (in some cases conflicting system level goals) and the persistence of savings can be poor and as a consequence inefficiencies re-appear. Continuous energy auditing takes this one-off process and makes it a constant rolling cycle where a detailed overview of the building performance is consistently available making it possible to refine the energy management plan. TOPAs adopts the principle of continuous performance auditing and considers not only energy use but also an understanding of how buildings are used and their climatic state, thus providing a holistic performance audit process through supporting tools and methodologies that minimise the gap between predicted and actual energy use.

DIGITISE aspires to enable the digital literacy and empowerment of consumers/ prosumers as well as the active engagement in digital energy activities and markets and the obtainment of an active role in the energy transition. It brings together proven know-how and tangible expertise around energy systems and flexibility services, energy markets and transactions, social/ human engagement in digital ecosystems. It integrates advanced technologies for Innovative Cross-Sector Services, Digital Twins, DLT-enabled Marketplaces, AI Analytics and Big Data Management, Interoperability and Security, into a holistic end-to-end consumer empowerment framework that will be extensively validated in 1 well and long established Living Lab and 4 large-scale demonstration sites in Greece, Spain, Croatia and Ireland involving the required actors (consumers, prosumers and the business actors: Retailers/Aggregators/LECs), diverse, cross domain data sources, heterogeneous energy and non-energy systems/assets, and multi-variate climatic and socio-economic characteristics.