María Eguaras and César Martín Gómez (from right to left, in the front row), at the meeting launching of project, held in Thessaloniki. PHOTO: Courtesy

César Martín Gómez, María Eguaras, Iñaki Esteban and Marina Vidaurre, researchers at School of Architecture of the University of Navarra, are participating in the international project Adapt 4EE, related to energy efficiency in construction.

César Martín Gómez and María Eguaras attended the meeting launching of the initiative in Thessaloniki, as researcher of the School and as a contract researcher, respectively.

Adapt4EE involves the collaboration of 9 centers from research, universities and companies from Greece, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Germany and Portugal. It will end in October 2014 and has a funding of 3,630,000 euros.

INTERVIEW WITH DIMITRIOS TZOVARAS, COORDINATOR OF ADAPT4EE

Which are the main purposes of this project?

Adapt4EE aims at augmenting the contemporary architectural envelope by incorporating business and occupancy related information thus providing a holistic approach to the planning, design & evaluation of energy performance of construction products at an early design phase and prior to their realization.

Adapt4EE aims to deliver and validate a holistic energy performance framework that incorporates architectural metadata and environmental parameters (BIM), critical business models (BPM), treating occupants as the central reference point. The Adapt4EE framework, identifying and analyzing occupancy behavior (presence and movement) will align energy consumption points to all interrelated enterprise aspects (business processes, enterprise assets and utility state and operations).

What is Adapt4EE about?

Adapt4EE will develop an enhanced semantic enterprise data model that treats, learns and manages the enterprise environment as an intelligent agent, perceives environmental state using multi-type sensors and information modalities. The Adapt4EE Enterprise Model will incorporate business processes and occupancy data. It will also constitute a formal model for enterprise energy performance measuring, monitoring, simulation, prediction and optimization.

The model will be calibrated during the training phase based on sensor data captured during operation and then applied and evaluated in real-life every day enterprise operations. More specifically the Adapt4EE Enterprise Models will allow for the proactive identification of optimum local adaptations of enterprise utility operations, based on predictions of possible occupancy patterns and respective business operations and energy profiles.

Adapt4EE will provide a set of Open Business Reference Models as well as respective methods and tools for modelling and simulating the real life operation of construction products, thus allowing for more accurate and realistic evaluation of the energy impact of alternative design and planning decisions.

How many partners participate in the project?

Nine partners from Greece, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Germany and Slovakia.

- Centre for Research & Technology Hellas - Informatics & Telematics Institute, Greece
- Universidad de Navarra, Spain
- Associacao Academica de Coimbra-Organismo Autonomo de Futebol Pcup, Portugal
- BOC Information Technologies Consulting Limited, Ireland
- Hypertech AE, Greece
- Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der Angewandten Forschung E.V., Germany
- Almende B.V.., Netherlands
- Technical University Kosice, Slovakia
- ISA - Intelligent Sensing Anywhere S.A., Portugal