URB-Grade: Decision Support Tool for Retrofitting a District, Towards the District as a Service (URB-GRADE)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: ICT for a low carbon economy
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: Denmark,Spain,Finland,Spain,Denmark
Call:  (FP7-2012-NMP-ENV-ENERGY-ICT-EeB, 2012)
Start date: 2012-11-01
End date: 2016-01-31
Duration (months): 39.0
Total project cost (EUR): 3965609.0
EU funding (EUR): 2663716.0
Participants: 11
Project status: CLOSED

The URB-Grade project designs, develops and validates a Platform for Decision Support that will allow the city authorities and utilities to promote and choose the correct actions to upgrade a district to become more energy efficient, cost effective and to increase comfort for its citizens in a District as a Service Platform (DaaS Platform) approach. The main users of the platform are city authorities. It is envisioned that the platform will become a major tool for city planning and decision making for a city. Other stakeholders include the utility companies and energy consumers in general. The information necessary for the platform will be based on collecting data from heterogeneous distributed sensors (e.g. smart meters and embedded sensors) and other open data sources (e.g. energy grade of buildings) or survey based data. Data is processed using complex event processing (CEP) techniques to generate relevant information for the DaaS platform. Information will be made available over a common cloud based service platform. The DaaS platform will enable city authorities to operate the District as a Service; meaning that cities can increasingly be operated by decisions supported with real-time data in addition to more traditional government collected data sets from surveys and statistical data. This will increase the cost effectiveness of decisions as well as the ability to take better account of citizens’ wishes and needs. The approach of the URB-Grade project is to focus on the city authority as the primary customer of the DaaS Platform. The intention is to support actions for: (1) Public Facility Management – make decisions on energy saving investments. (2) Private Facility Policy Support – make decisions about policies and awareness. Currently, this is performed by two possible approaches: (A) Theoretical approach: a theoretical analysis based on statistics and surveys. (B) ESCO approach: intensive measurement, analysis, definition of saving measures, implementation and validation. It is evident that the ESCO approach due to the collection of intensive measurements has the best precondition of producing energy saving results. However it is currently not economically feasible to perform intensive measurements on a larger scale such as a district, or on a large amount of heterogeneous data. The innovation of URB-Grade is to mix the two approaches to find a middle ground, combining real measurements with statistical and survey data to obtain the benefits of an ESCO approach while maintaining the feasibility of a statistical approach and minimising the necessary extrapolation. The URB-Grade project will demonstrate the approach in three validation sites for different decision support issues: (1) Eibar (Spain) – upgrading street lighting (2) Kalundborg (Denmark) – energy efficient residential buildings (3) Barcelona – upgrading street shops