The vision of the ARV project is to contribute to speedy wide scale implementation of Climate Positive Circular Communities (CPCC) where people can thrive and prosper for generations to come. The overall aim is to demonstrate and validate attractive, resilient, and affordable solutions for CPCC that will significantly speed up the deep energy renovations and the deployment of energy and climate measures in the construction and energy industries. To achieve this, the ARV project will employ a novel concept relying on a combination of 3 conceptual pillars, 6 demonstration projects, and 9 thematic focus areas. The 3 conceptual pillars are integration, circularity and simplicity. Integration in ARV means the coupling of people, buildings, and energy systems, through multi-stakeholder co-creation and use of innovative digital tools. Circularity in ARV means a systematic way of addressing circular economy through automated use of LCA, digital logbooks and material banks. Simplicity in ARV means to make the solutions easy to understand and use for all stakeholders, from manufacturers to end-users. The 6 demos are urban regeneration projects in 6 locations around Europe. They have been carefully selected to represent the different European climates and contexts, and due to their high ambitions in environmental, social and economic sustainability. Renovation of social housing and public buildings are specifically focused. Together, they will demonstrate more than 50 innovations in more than 150,00 m2 of buildings. The 9 thematic focus areas are 1) Effective planning and implementation of CPCCs, 2) Citizen engagement, environment and well-being, 3) Sustainable building re(design) 4) Resource efficient manufacturing and construction workflows, 5) Integrated renewables and storage, 6) Energy management and flexibility, 7) Monitoring and evaluation, 8) Business models, financial mechanisms, policy and exploitation, 9) Communication, dissemination, and stakeholder outreach.

MulitPACK will be the confidence building demonstrator for standardised integrated cooling & heating packages installed in high energy demanding buildings. The roll-out of new energy efficient plug-and-play units should reduce the specific energy consumption by more than 25 %, simultaneously reducing the total cost of ownership. A scientific-supported introduction of innovative packages, all parts made in Europe, applying the natural working fluid CO2 and the latest efficiency enhancing technologies will validate the suitability of the CO2 heat pumping and refrigeration technology for warm climate applications. The EU F-gas regulation forces the end-users to request new heat pump solutions in the near future. The upcoming process of replacing non –renewable or F-gas based heating/cooling units, especially in Southern Europe, represents the business case for the industry. Especially South-European contractors have to be trained to become confident and motivated to offer innovative heat pumping solutions, as for example developed by MulitPACK. Pack manufacturers, typically being SMEs like ENEX, do not have the possibility to shake down new developments in a laboratory environment representing real life conditions. Therefore, MultiPACK will reduce the risk and fear for the end-user accepting the installation of demonstration/validation units in their properties, solving the challenge of “innovation without risk for the end user”. To this aim, six remotely controlled and monitored demonstration/validation sites (3/3) at several South-European locations at energy demanding end-users will be utilised. The real performance of new integrated packs providing refrigeration/space cooling & heating with high levels of indoor comfort and sanitary hot water demand will be measured and reported. Training material supporting end users and contractors towards a successful implementation of integrated packs will become public via the MulitPACK communication centre.

The overall concept of MANTIS is to provide a proactive maintenance service platform architecture based on Cyber Physical Systems that allows to estimate future performance, to predict and prevent imminent failures and to schedule proactive maintenance. Maintenance is no longer a necessary evil that costs what it costs, but an important function that creates additional value in the business process as well as new business models with a stronger service orientation. Physical systems (e.g. industrial machines, vehicles, renewable energy assets) and the environment they operate in, are monitored continuously by a broad and diverse range of intelligent sensors, resulting in massive amounts of data that characterise the usage history, operational condition, location, movement and other physical properties of those systems. These systems form part of a larger network of heterogeneous and collaborative systems (e.g. vehicle fleets or photovoltaic and windmill parks) connected via robust communication mechanisms able to operate in challenging environments. MANTIS consists of distributed processing chains that efficiently transform raw data into knowledge while minimising the need for bandwidth. Sophisticated distributed sensing and decision making functions are performed at different levels in a collaborative way, ranging from local nodes to locally optimise performance, bandwidth and maintenance; to cloud-based platforms that integrate information from diverse systems and execute distributed processing and analytics algorithms for global decision making. The research addressed in MANTIS will contribute to companies' assets availability, competitiveness, growth and sustainability. Use cases will be the testing ground for the innovative functionalities of the proactive maintenance service platform architecture and for its future exploitation in the industrial world. Results of MANTIS can be utilised directly in several industry areas and different fields of maintenanance.

It is in urban areas that the demand for heating and cooling demand assumes highest density. At the same time a huge amount of low-grade waste heat is diffused within the urban texture, the largest amount being rejected by air-conditioners, cooling systems in industrial processes and tertiary buildings (i.e. dry coolers and wet cooling towers), datacentres’ chillers and supermarkets’ refrigeration systems. Moreover, for historic reasons, cities have born along rivers, lakes and seashores. All these sources make low-temperature renewable energy available, which utilisation is highly replicable because it is accessible right where it is needed. Having this in mind, the overall objective of REWARDHeat is to demonstrate a new generation of low-temperature district heating and cooling networks, which will be able to recover low-grade renewable and waste heat available at low temperature. Focusing on the exploitation of the energy sources available within the urban context allows to maximize the replicability potential of the decentralized solutions developed in the project. REWARDHeat will promote punctual metering, thermal storage management, network smart control as means to enable and optimise the exploitation of renewable and waste heat in DHC networks. At the same time, this approach permits a change of paradigm with respect to the business models devised: thermal energy will not be seen as a commodity anymore, rather it will be sold as a service to the customers.

Sharing Cities has four key objectives. 1) To achieve scale in the European smart cities market by proving that properly designed smart city solutions, based around common needs, can be integrated in complex urban environments. This will be done in a way that exhibits their true potential and allows for the significant scale-up and consequent increase in social, economic and environmental value. 2) Adopt a digital first approach which proves the extent to which ICT integration can improve and connect up existing infrastructure, as well as the design and running of new city infrastructure. This will also allow for the creation of a new set of next stage digital services which will help citizens make better and beneficial choices around energy efficiency and mobility, which when scaled up will enhance the city’s ability to hit key targets for mobility, housing, energy efficiency and resilience, and economic development. 3) Accelerate the market to understand, develop and trial business, investment and governance models, essential for the true aggregation and replication (through collaboration) of smart city solutions in cities of different sizes and maturities. In doing this, we intend to accelerate the pace by which we make transformative improvements, and enhance sustainability in communities. 4) Share and collaborate for society: to respond to increasing demand for participation; to enhance mechanisms for citizens’ engagement; to improve local governments capacity for policy making and service delivery through collaboration and co-design; resulting in outcomes that are better for citizens, businesses and visitors. These will be delivered by a range of expert partners across 8 work packages.