Assistant for Quality Check during Construction Execution Processes for Energy-efficienT buildings Problem: What the consortium sees as a major problem today is the potential loss of benefits of energy-efficient building components because of the lack of knowledge or bad implementation during the construction processes. Solution: During the project ACCEPT will be created – An assistant for quality check during construction execution processes for energy-efficienT buildings. The assistant will run on Smart Glasses and unobtrusively guide workers during the construction on site. This provides a standardized and coordinated process for all workers, ensuring that all benefits of energy-efficient building components are maintained. From a user perspective ACCEPT is focused on the following very clear main results: 1. The Construction Operator Assistant App (CoOpApp) running on Smart Glasses, which passively collects data and actively provides guidance to the worker on site during the building process. (Pillar I: Advanced Knowledge Transfer for Energy-efficient Construction) 2. A Site Manager App (SiMaApp) running on a mobile device, which allows to remotely coordinate the working process as well as collect additional data on site by different sensors. (Pillar II: Agile Project Coordination for Bridging Heterogeneity) 3. An interactive web-based Dashboard as a monitoring and quality assurance solution. The Dashboard will use self-inspection methods to determine important characteristics such as U-Values. (Pillar III: Adaptive Quality Assurance with Self-Inspection Features) The project is fully build around achieving a maximum of impaxt: The three results will be accompanied by 7 real-world pilots grouped into 3 piloting areas within the project. Pilots are located in 4 different EU countries.

Transport infrastructure is highly important on the EU Strategic Agenda. This infrastructure is facing real challenges due to ageing, rapid growth of traffic loads, and natural and man-made resilience threats. Safety risks have become critical in the recent years and manifested in major disasters caused a.o. by structural failures due to maintenance deficiencies. Optimal maintenance is only possible with the right policies and decisions enabled by timely and accurate information from monitoring. Unfortunately, monitoring is not adequately addressed in the existing standards (CEN TC/250 Eurocodes) and there are gaps in the monitoring practices at national level. Therefore, IM-SAFE aims to support the European Commission and the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) to prepare a new standard in monitoring for optimal maintenance and safety of transport infrastructure based on a comprehensive insight into the trends, challenges, best practices, and technology developments, including the integration of digital innovations. As the effectiveness of the new standard depends on societal acceptance, IM-SAFE simultaneously aims to coordinate and enable public authorities and industries to contribute to standardisation, roll-out, and implementation. The key targeted results from IM-SAFE are: 1) formulation of an EC mandate to CEN; 2) consolidated technical background materials for CEN; and 3) active engagement of stakeholders and experts in the Community of Practice (CoP) and Standardisation Advisory Group (SAG). The IM-SAFE consortium represents a European network of standardisation experts from research and higher educational institutes, large industries, SMEs, and a non-profit platform working on the transport infrastructure along the EU TEN-T and regional corridors. The consortium collaborates with leading infrastructure asset owners and operators as well as monitoring and maintenance companies. These stakeholders and the consortium together have initiated IM-SAFE.

The overall aim of the S-CODE project is to investigate, develop, validate and initially integrate radically new concepts for switches and crossings that have the potential to lead to increases in capacity, reliability and safety while reducing investment and operating costs. The S-CODE project will identify radically different technology concepts that can be integrated together to achieve significantly improved performance for S&C based around new operating concepts (e.g. super-fast switching, self-healing switch). The project will build on existing European and national research projects (in particular, the lighthouse project In2Rail, Capacity4Rail and Innotrack) to bring together technologies and concepts that will significantly reduce the constraints associated with existing switch technologies and develop a radically different solution. The project will be divided into three phases: Phase 1: Requirements and initial design - focusing on understanding constraints and critical requirements, and developing a radically different architecture and operation that makes use of technologies from other domains; Phase 2: Technical development - undertaking detailed modelling and simulation to identify an optimal configuration to maximise performance; Phase 3: Validation and evaluation - testing (to TRL4) the design concepts and formally evaluating their performance in order that an integrated design can be presented for further development.

COGITO aims to speed up the digitalisation for lean construction as a steppingstone to achieve the industrialisation of the construction sector (“construction 4.0”). The COGITO solution comprises: i) an interoperable Digital Twin platform for semantic/ pragmatic alignment with services; ii) Reality capture tools will collect real-time data about the actual state and progress/evolution of the construction site; iii) Multi-source Data Stream Pre-Processing services will manage and semantically annotate big data streams to analyse complex data (e.g. drones, satellite images) to retrieve the necessary information about the actual status of the construction site and resources/ workers involved; iv) adaptive Workflow Management for visual progress monitoring of the construction site and optimal flow of information to relevant stakeholders; v) the Health & Safety service will analyse the nD BIM to pinpoint hazards and perform real-time alerting to prevent accidents based on live data from the site; vi) the Geometric and Visual Quality Control service will perform automated quality control checks through comparisons of as-is to as-designed BIM elements for verification of structure conditions and detection of geometric and visual defects; vii) the Digital Twin GUI will render the site 3D model – including static (as-designed BIM), quasi-static (as-built BIM) and dynamic information (e.g. asset, machinery, people locations); and viii) Workers On-site Guidance Applications will issue alerts to crews on site with information contextually relevant to their allocated tasks. The COGITO tool-box will be demonstrated in one lab facility in Austria and two real construction sites in Spain and Germany to showcase its value and collect feedback for improvement from the field. Beyond technical activities, standardization activities will be carried out by two COGITO partners with strong links to the most important international standardisation bodies in this domain.