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 Ren(n)ovates proposal focuses on the deployment and demonstration of an innovative systemic, 4-step holistic approach comprising state-of-the-art renovation with state-or-the-art smart ICT control. Deep renovation of residential buildings will be carried out including the installation of a standardised pre-fabricated energy module equipped with communication technology converting the buildings into Net Zero Energy Buildings. This can be achieved with minimal disturbance to the tenant and with minimal renovation costs for the tenant/building owner by means of an innovative business model. The inclusion of interoperable smart control strategies introduced at building- , cluster- and business level, implemented on existing software platforms and standard compliant serve to ‘unlock’ the residential energy flexibility for grid and system level services. The project addresses the call for Energy-Efficient Buildings (H2020-EeB-2015), more specifically the topic EeB-08-2015 : Integrated Approach to Retrofitting of Residential Buildings.