ENTROPY - The challenge of energy efficiency in buildings

 

Summer 2018


As stated in the Energy Efficiency Plan 2011, the greatest energy saving potential lies in buildings. The ENTROPY project addresses the challenge of energy efficiency in buildings via the design and development of novel solutions for accomplishing energy savings.

The ENTROPY project designs, deploys and assesses the ENTROPY ecosystem, an innovative energy-aware Internet-of-Things (IoT) platform for motivating end-users engagement and behavioral changes towards the adoption of energy efficient lifestyles. The ENTROPY ecosystem builds upon (a) IoT technologies for interconnecting numerous devices and collecting energy-related information from heterogeneous data sources, (b) advanced Data Modelling and Analysis techniques that support the realization of semantic models and knowledge extraction mechanisms and (c) recommendation and gamification mechanisms that stimulate users interest for energy efficient activities and educate them in adopting more energy efficient lifestyles.

Specifically, the ENTROPY ecosystem engages the end users by developing a set of serious games and personalized mobile applications that provide to the users energy-related information and recommendations for achieving energy savings in their daily activities. The users can monitor in real-time the energy data streams from the IoT-enabled buildings through the ENTROPY platform. Additionally, a digital-physical interactive game with VR capabilities provides to the users behavioral-based adaptive educational content and interaction with the sensors and IoT energy monitoring devices. Overall, the users have a unique, educational experience interacting with energy monitoring devices and gamified applications; and realizing how fruitful means can enable energy efficient behavior and lifestyle.

Overall, the ENTROPY ecosystem introduces a number of innovative features. First of all, the ecosystem enables the easy and seamless integration of IoT devices and sensors installed in buildings, as well as plugin functionalities. Additionally, ENTROPY platform makes analytics easy, secure and comprehensible. The ecosystem ensures that every user, without any prior analytics knowledge, will be able to upload, build or execute energy analytics algorithms and explore the energy efficiency results via a user-friendly visualization module. The provided knowledge of energy consumption and efficiency can ultimately assist in decision making for the building energy managers. Further, the provided digital-physical interactive serious game and the mobile personalized app promote and enable change of energy consumption behavior through adaptive educational content. Finally, the ENTROPY platform has one more unique feature; it provides analytics of the users' behavior that interact with the serious game and the personalized app. In brief, the ENTROPY platform is also a means to see and evaluate the users/ consumers actual energy behavior in the building. Last, but not least, the ENTROPY system has implemented all the necessary EU prescriptions in order to protect the users' data privacy.

The ENTROPY ecosystem will be evaluated through its application to three public buildings: the Navacchio Technology Park (www.polotecnologico.it) close to Pisa in Italy, the Technological park and University campus in University of Murcia in Spain and the Technopole in Sierre in Switzerland.

The target audience and potential interested stakeholders range from Utilities / Smart Grids and Smart Cities stakeholders to individual end-users interested in home and/or office services that enable energy efficiency


Contact information
Website: www.entropy-project.eu
Email: skarmeta@um.es
Email: cleobar@aueb.gr