This project imagines a future world empowered by access to discoverable, reliable, ubiquitous real-time data from buildings, such that digital solutions can rapidly scale and where energy efficiency knowledge can be widely encapsulated and disseminated within highly accessible software ‘Applications’. Applications, in this context, are conceived as easy-to-configure and instantiate software micro-services, built on top of a common software infrastructure that facilitates data access under well-defined application program interfaces (APIs) deployed on edge-computing devices or the cloud.  Such Applications are somewhat analogous to the ‘Apps‘ we use on personal mobile devices.

By embracing modern IT approaches and advances in digital technology, the project aims to overcome barriers to the provision of energy efficiency software services, and reduce reliance on manual/onsite service delivery.

The project will investigate the potential of Software-as-a-Service innovation and intelligent data-driven building automation, in order to reduce energy use in buildings and enable buildings to participate as distributed energy resources in support of increased use of variable renewable electricity sources. 

The project objectives are to:

• provide the knowledge, standards, protocols and procedures for low-cost high-quality data capture, sharing and utilization in buildings
• develop a control-oriented building modelling framework that enables testing, development and assessment of the impact of alternative building HVAC control strategies in a digital environment
• develop building energy efficiency software Applications that can be used and ideally commercialized for reducing energy use in buildings
• drive the adoption of results through case studies, business model innovation and results dissemination. The case studies collected can be found on the datasmartbuildings.org web page.