The iFLEX project aims at empowering the consumers by making it as easy as possible for them to participate in demand response. A core concept of the project is the iFLEX Assistant, a novel software agent that acts between consumer(s), and their energy systems, various stakeholders and The iFLEX project aims at empowering the consumers by making it as easy as possible for them to participate in demand response. A core concept of the project is the iFLEX Assistant, a novel software agent that acts between consumer(s), and their energy systems, various stakeholders and external systems helping them to achieve mutual benefits through local energy management and DR. The iFLEX Assistants are designed to provide a common approach to enhance user experience, level of automation and personalization in a wide variety of DR and energy services. Because of different requirements of these services, the project provides a common software framework (i.e., iFLEX Framework) for developing application-specific iFLEX Assistants that are customized for the needs of particular service(s). The focus is especially on households and DR for supporting high penetration of renewables. In addition, there is a need for effective incentives and market structures that encourage consumers to invest in these innovative DR solutions. To this end, the iFLEX Assistants are customizable for different incentive and market mechanisms to allow exploitation of the solution in different countries and climatic regions, as well as, to enable A/B testing of different incentive and user engagement mechanisms with real-users. Although the focus is on electricity, the iFLEX project targets to overcome the current silo-approaches and provide holistic energy management that optimizes across various energy vectors. Co-creation with end-users is inherent in different project phases and coordinated by consumer organisation in the consortium. iFlex validation is carried out with field pilots in three climatic regions.

INDEPENDENT aims to overcome the main obstacles for large-scale adoption of flexibility services in buildings and industry by providing an Integrated Development and Operations Platform (IDOP) for standard-compliant Customer Energy Management Systems (CEMS) and Aggregator Energy Management Systems (AEMS). IDOP will be interoperable with over 40 energy management systems and 60 smart appliance vendors and cover 90% of the flexibility in buildings and industrial sites. IDOP will help to reduce energy costs and CO2 emissions by providing open interfaces, innovative AI, and optimisation solutions for flexible resource modelling, optimal control, multi-market operation, and the automated integration of legacy systems. Simultaneously, IDOP will significantly reduce the development, deployment, and operational expenses, thereby establishing DSFM as a sustainable business on a large scale. IDOP commits to full compliance with the DSFM standards, including the EN 50491-12 and IEC 62746 standard families, and the SAREF ontology. Additionally, IDOP introduces Gaia-X-compatible data spaces to govern data in buildings and industrial sites. The project brings together 14 partners, including four aggregators, seven EMS service companies, and two major home appliance manufacturers that will adopt IDOP-based solutions into their offerings. The IDOP-based CEMS and AEMS will be demonstrated and qualified in large-scale pilots in four countries. A total of 1,4 MWh flexibility capacity will be harnessed from buildings and industrial sites and connected to eight operational energy wholesale, TSO, and DSO flexibility markets to demonstrate the CEMS and AEMS at TRL 8. The IDOP solutions will enable the energy transition by reducing GHG emissions by 1.9 million tons a year for all customers in 6–10 years. The solutions provide also significant monetary benefits: 15% RoI and 3,6 billion EUR cost reductions a year compared to the situation without any DSFM solution.

The RESONANCE project develops an innovative software framework that provides means for rapid development and plug-and-play deployment of standard-compliant Customer Energy Manager (CEM), Resource Manager (RM), and their aggregation solutions. The CEM, specified in the EN 50491-12 standard family, is the next-generation demand-side flexibility management (DSFM) solution in Europe. CEM is a software agent that automates DSFM by interacting with smart appliances (represented by RMs), aggregators, and the markets to maximize customer benefits. According to the new EN 50491-12-2 standard, CEMs are envisioned to 1) provide a more deterministic demand response, and 2) be able to optimize consumer benefits with respect to multiple incentives and optimization targets. To achieve this, there is a need for accurate models of flexible assets (smart appliances) and model predictive control techniques to automate the decision-making within the customer premises. The RESONANCE Framework will facilitate the adoption of CEMs as the next generation DSFM system by significantly reducing the development efforts and costs. This is achieved with 1) a standard-compliant and modular system architecture, and 2) an innovative modeling pipeline that combines automated machine learning (AutoML) with physics-based modeling to provide accurate and robust models of flexible assets with minimum effort. The project brings together 19 partners (including a cluster with 40 organizations) with inter-disciplinary expertise and forms a basis for a cross-sector energy ecosystem that significantly contributes to the mobilization of DSFM at a large scale. Large scale piloting in six member states with a variety of consumer sectors, flexible assets (e.g. electric vehicles, HVAC systems, and white goods), stakeholders, and market settings (including sector integration with district heating) is utilized for demonstrating and validating the scalability and replication potential of the solutions.

The advent of distributed power sources, such as photovoltaics and windmill plants, gave rise to energy prosumers (producers-consumers), which generate and consume electrical energy. Energy demand and energy generation by prosumers are volatile and can impact the grid infrastructure and stakeholders, but they can be flexibly adapted to thwart those impacts. Flex4Grid aims at creating an open data and service framework that enables a novel concept of managing flexibility of prosumer demand and generation, utilising cloud computing for power grid management and, opening DSO infrastructure for aggregator services. The system will be built up from existing ICT components developed by the consortium partners over many years in research projects on IoT and Cloud computing. This high maturity allows Flex4Grid to aim for a system prototype of TRL 7 which guarantees a maximum impact and competitiveness in the area of the smart grid challenge. The Flex4Grid system will include a) a data cloud service with anonymised interface and advanced security and privacy mechanisms for data exchange and service management, b) prosumer generation and demand flexibility, and c) a more viable business model to accelerate the deployment. The major innovations are a) opening the market for new entrants by secure and privacy enabling third party cloud data and energy management services, b) actionable common and multilevel data management and analytics services for Smart Grids, and c) the use of co-creation to bring end users into the value creation process. System validation will be carried out in real-world pilots in three live electricity networks with different scenarios ranging from deployment during smart meter rollout and retrofitting to large scale operation and federated demonstration of multi-site pilots.

ESSENCE aims at transforming the lessons learnt from the COVID-19 in a huge opportunity that exploits technology toward a deep evolution of the services targeting vulnerable populations: non- or pre-frail seniors, and children of the first years of primary school. To contribute to the public health response in the context of the ongoing epidemic, and preparedness for future emergencies, ESSENCE aims at boosting the creation of a new model of home-based care that relies on stimulation, remote monitoring, tele-assistance, and connection between users, families, and professionals. ESSENCE builds upon the results of MoveCare H2020 and adopts an iterative optimization process between two pillars - technology transfer of a subset of successful modules and feedback received from testing on target users – with the final target of achieving CE mark and promptly entering the mark The ESSENCE system consists of three main components: - the Community-Based Activity Center (CBAC), a holistic platform, based on virtual rooms, providing a series of diverse activities with declared recreational, socialization, educational, and assistive purposes; - the Monitoring Module, that gathers heterogeneous information from the activities mediated by the CBAC, a smart ink pen, and diverse applications to extract cognitive, physical, and emotion-related indicators. AI is exploited to provide personalized feedback, and alerts for deviations from physiological behaviors; - the ESSENCE Manager, that acts as the system control unit to manage user profiling, system configuration, possible system malfunctioning, and delivery of notifications, alerts, or feedback. Through ESSENCE, a multi-level user empowerment will be promoted both by: (i) delivering empathic feedback aimed at maximizing engagement and relieving stress; (ii) producing alerts on potential risks to family members and health and education professionals aimed at fostering early detection of possible weaknesses and anticipation of care.