ExPEDite aims to create and deploy a novel Digital Twin (DT) for real-time monitoring, visualization, and management of district-level energy flows. The project will deliver a suite of replicable modeling tools, allowing stakeholders to analyze planning actions towards positive energy and climate neutrality in a cost-effective manner. The tools will be able to model the district’s energy production and demand, building stock performance, optimize for flexibility and simulate mobility and transport. The DT’s design-platform will analyze various what-if planning actions, aiding energy and urban planners’ evidence-based decision-making processes, while its run-time engine will optimize the districts energy utilization efficiency. The DT will follow a modular open architecture to support multi-sectoral and multi-organizational stakeholder requirements. By employing gamification and co-creation approaches, the project will enhance public awareness and engagement in energy efficiency. The ExPEDite DT will be applied to a district in Riga, Latvia, and will provide practical guidelines, reusable models, algorithms, and training materials to aid other cities in replicating the DT for their districts, fostering widespread adoption of sustainable energy practices.

Today public authorities need to provide better services with fewer resources. Citizens require accessible, user-friendly, personalised, and integrated public services that match their needs and circumstances. At the same time, trust in the public sector deteriorates. We argue the solution rests in enhancing existing relevant EU work (on policies, models, frameworks, roadmaps etc) by adopting best research and practice (e.g. in public service co-creation) and by exploiting relevant technologies particularly mobile apps, virtual assistants (chatbots), knowledge graphs, and linked data. We acknowledge that for many years, the EU is providing useful practical advice including frameworks (e.g. EIF), models (e.g. CPSV), architectures (e.g. EIRA), roadmaps, etc. These however are not directly applicable anymore as they do not incorporate the latest research and practice, e.g. in public service co-creation. Similarly, research is not related to EU work and practice is not related to research. The vision of the inGov project is to provide innovative ICT-supported governance models as well as mobile apps including chatbots, which will enable stakeholders' collaboration in co-producing inclusive and accessible Integrated Public Services (IPS) thus increasing trust and satisfaction. For that purpose, multidisciplinary scientific methods will be used including design science, multiple case study and variants of the technology acceptance model. The project results will be piloted in Malta to modernise the digital family household public service (affecting 200,000 households), in Austria to deploy IPS for collecting tourism tax (affecting 3,200 accommodation providers), in Greece to digitise the disabled card renewal service (benefiting 11,500 disabled, low-income citizens) and in Croatia to create AI-driven virtual assistants and services (affecting 32,000 citizens). We aim to feed our results back to EU policies hence achieving alignment between policies, research and practice.