SPHERE’s ultimate goal is the Improvement and optimisation of buildings’ energy design, construction, performance, and management, reducing construction costs and their environmental impact while increasing overall energy performance. SPHERE project will integrate two planes of research, innovation and improvement: • integration of the processes under the Digital Twin Concept involving not only the Design and Construction of the Building but including also the Manufacturing and the Operational phases • integrated platform that will be achieved through an underlying ICT Systems of Systems infrastructure based on Platform as a Service (PaaS) service to allow large scale data, information and knowledge integration and synchronization thus allowing a better handling and processing e.g BIMBots, machine learning , simulation etc. This Digital Twin concept is in fact a distributed but coordinated Database, including geometrical objects information that forms a unique synchronized virtual model of the reality. As has been proven in other fields, twinning this virtual information model with the reality helps significantly in decision-making during each phase of the whole building’s lifespan (manufacturing, design, construction, maintenance, operation, retrofitting and even demolition). The SPHERE cloud-ICT platform will allow to interact all different stakeholders during any phase of the asset with a building Digital Twin model of information of the building and a scalable set of different software tools, such as energy demand/performance simulation tools, Decision Support and Coaching Systems, BEMs or IoT enabled Predictive Maintenance Algorithms. The Digital Twin Concept, platform and Tools will be tested in four real pilots and finally validateted both technically and especially final social acceptance to accelerate market uptake.

There are significant concerns about the UK's ability to meet national and international climate change targets and long term security of supply. There exists many opportunities to improve the efficient use of thermal energy in existing buildings/plants and modes of transport and to give greater consideration to thermal energy management in future designs. Industrial consumption accounted for 18% of total UK final energy consumption in 2011. Within this industrial sector, heat use (space heating, drying/separation, high/low temperature processing) accounts for over 70% of total UK industrial energy use. The market potential for waste heat is estimated to be between 10TWh - 40TWh per annum. Recent developments in energy processing and the need for CO2 reduction have led to a growing interest in using this heat. SMEs account for 45% of industrial energy use but their processes and plants are often less efficient, largely due to the financial cost of optimisation . It is therefore important to ensure support and focus is given to SMEs, particularly addressing the barriers to effective thermal use applicable to this part of the economy. Commercial and residential buildings are responsible for approximately 40% of the UK's total non-transport energy use, with space heating and hot water accounting for almost 80% of residential and 60% of commercial energy use between sectors. Marine and rail transport contribute over 14 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent to UK annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and similar opportunities to those in the industrial and building sectors to reduce thermal energy demand exist. The adoption of increasingly stringent emissions legislation and increasing fuel costs have made it even more important that the thermal energy in the power and propulsion is optimised, for example through greater energy recovery and storage. The SusTEM Network will build upon the success of the PRO-TEM Network and expanding its remit. This will include the engagement of researchers with social and economic expertise and widening the network through further engagement with industry, particularly SMEs, academia and government and policy makers (local and national) who have not previously participated in the PRO-TEM Network. SusTEM Network will have the following key objectives: 1. Provide a forum to incorporate stakeholder opinions in the area of thermal energy management for the industrial, building, and transport sectors. 2. Engage with multi-disciplinary researchers within the research community at UK HE institutions, including End Use Energy Demand Centres, to maximise dissemination, impact, reach and significance of research outcomes. 3. Stimulate knowledge transfer between academia, industry, government and other stakeholders. 4. Identify and promote future research requirements based on partner contributions, road-mapping and links to Knowledge Transfer Networks (KTN), European Technology Platforms (ETP) and other relevant networks and initiatives. 5. Foster long-term collaboration between outstanding research teams in the UK and China and to ensure there is a two way transfer of knowledge.

Measurement campaigns have shown major discrepancies in buildings energy performance between planned energy demand and real energy consumption, while nowadays most of the newly constructed offices buildings are equipped with BMS systems, integrating a more or less extended measurement layer providing large amounts of data. Their integration in the building management sector offers an improvement capability of 22 % as some studies demonstrate. The HIT2GAP project will develop a new generation of building monitoring and control tools based on advanced data treatment techniques allowing new approaches to assess building energy performance data, getting a better understanding of building’s behaviour and hence a better performance. From a strong research layer on data, HIT2GAP will build on existing measurement and control tools that will be embedded into a new software platform for performance optimization. The solution will be: - Fully modular: able to integrate several types and generations of data treatment modules (different algorithms) and data display solutions, following a plug and play approach - Integrating data mining for knowledge discovery (DMKD) as a core technique for buildings’ behaviour assessment and understanding The HIT2GAP solution will be applied as a novel intelligent layer offering new capability of the existing BMS systems and offering the management stakeholders opportunities for services with a novel added value. Applying the solutions to groups of buildings will also allow to test energy demand vs. local production management modules. This will be tested in various pilot sites across Europe. HIT2GAP work will be realized with a permanent concern about market exploitation of the solutions developed within the project, with specific partnerships about business integration of the tools in the activity of key energy services partners of the consortium.