Developing and Integrating the FORTESIE Reference Architecture for Smart Renovation Services

The Renovation Wave aims to double EU building renovations by 2030. FORTESIE supports a holistic approach to meet these goals, focusing on the entire building lifecycle and integrating sustainability factors like materials, climate, and social impact. Renovations are essential for decarbonisation, economic growth and benefits like lower energy costs and job creation.

FORTESIE aims to create innovative renovation packages with smart guarantees and financing to speed up Europe's building renovation. These packages combine modern materials, technologies and digital tools to improve energy efficiency, reduce CO2 emissions and enhance comfort. They're optimised and tested in real-world situations.

An interoperable and extensible architecture incorporating numerous innovative digital technologies serves as a reference framework for integrating various potential technologies in energy services. It addresses challenges related to transparency and trustworthiness by integrating blockchain services to manage energy smart contracts. Standardisation is achieved by calculating actual and verified building performance improvements using a standardised Measurement and Verification (M&V) service, compliant with the IPMVP protocol, stored on the blockchain, eliminating any ambiguity in calculations among EPC (Energy Performance Contract) contractors and tenants. The M&V component constitutes a trusted data layer used to infeed customizable smart contracts. It is standardised to common data. It takes by Analytics component as input calculations. The EPC, through blockchain, lets ESCOs and Stakeholders see transparently the terms and status of investments for energy consumption optimisation.

An application compares current building performance to pre-renovation metrics, motivating users to take everyday actions, such as adjusting heating, by highlighting the associated costs and visualizes the terms of EPC and monthly payments, factoring in agreed guarantees and any bonuses or penalties based on energy savings or losses. The data sovereignty module systematizes data capture from of sensing components and data management platforms (BMS/ EMS/ IoT solutions) or external systems. It stores data in standardised format through relevant integration with Orion Context broker and homogenises its storage in a common data model, published as an agent to enable further reuse, interoperability and consuming or potential new applications. The architecture supports a data flow for green loan-based rewards, transparently using calculated building performance improvements to reward achieved CO2 savings (i.e., rewards for reducing energy consumption). These rewards can be used to repay a more affordable green Euro loan.

The FORTESIE architecture components support a smooth operation process. Hardware and software components have been integrated, based on their maturity. The reference architecture is the basis for the FORTESIE platform, which unifies different interdisciplinary modules. By taking into consideration the user requirements and system requirements, FORTESIE converges into an overall platform that aims to provide a friendly and useful tool to the end users. The FORTESIE project provides the measurement and monitoring of energy consumption with the dual aim to a. identify the performance improvements in the building/home in a standardised way, and document these in relation to the renovations implemented and connect these with EPC contracts offered by ESCOs, and b. to incentivise more energy efficient behaviour, personalised recommendations and the use of an alternative green-euro currency. The end-users will be able to use the FORTESIE application for both of these aims, and for this reason it receives data from the analytics, M&V and EPC module. Thus, the relevant measurements, analytics, recommendations and notifications are visualised. Also, energy consumption savings and green-euro earning can be monitored. Data Analytics, based on the Behavioural model and the Recommendation Engine, and the green-euro application balance can be available in the application through the relevant APIs. Multiple data sources (Data Sovereignty module and other data management platforms) are incorporated for FORTESIE, based on each pilot’s requirements and needs. In a high-level description, the FORTESIE architecture consists of several components and is depicted in the figure. Data needs to be communicated in a standardised format. Therefore, two relevant data flows are implemented for each of the aim described above, enabling the communication of the sub-components of the Data Sovereignty module. For this reason, the architecture has been slightly modified: Concerning the first flow, measurements from sensors and weather data are available directly to the Data Sovereignty component through the relevant data transformation and from there to analytics, M&V and EPC modules. The final result of the bonus/malus and monthly payment for the EPC contract and if available any green Euro reward is calculated. This flow utilises the blockchain where both M&V and EPC register the measured improvements and the smart contracts terms. For the second flow, the data from data sovereignty component is also transmitted to the analytics engine and then to the behaviour/recommendation engine to propose the hints and personalised tips for further improving the building performance. The data is captured by the building in three different ways, that are influenced by the existing way of capturing data used in the building: a. data may be transmitted directly by sensors installed in the building, b. a gateway device gathers data from the building if sensors cannot transit directly to the data sovereignty platform (i.e. LORA network is not available at the specific location), c. data can be gathered by other systems such as Building Management Systems (BMS), monitoring systems and IoT (Internet of Things) backend systems. For these reasons, three alternative connectivity methods have been developed and integrated to facilitate future integration and avoid new developments. These changes support the integration of data from multiple sources (sensing components, weather data and external systems), serving a wide range of needs for the pilots. These methods of data transformation have been incorporated, updating FORTESIE architecture accordingly, ensuring FAIR principles compliance, standardisation and interoperability.

Figure 1 FORTESIE architecture

FORTESIE facilitates the collection of a wide range of building data such as buildings' indoor and outdoor environmental conditions, temperature, relative humidity, and power and energy consumption, through different implementation methods in the data sovereignty layer. The challenge of data homogenization is addressed by defining FORTESIE (common) Data Model, which is based on Smart Data Models. This data model is consistently applied across all sensors, devices, and communication interfaces between digital components, and it is shared and standardized by adopting the NGSI-LD standard for data exchange across the entire architecture. The data sovereignty module has been implemented in FORTESIE by deploying the so-called esthesis platform.

The data collection process within the Data Sovereignty integrates multiple sources and systems deployed across buildings. This process includes: a) Direct communication with sensing devices, b) Integration of locally gathered data from gateways, and c) Interfacing with backend systems, such as Building Monitoring Applications or proprietary IoT solutions.

The mechanisms employed by FORTESIE include:

• Data Translation and Transmission: Using the FORTESIE Data Model, measurements are converted into NGSI-LD JSON format. The data is then transmitted to Orion-LD[1], adhering to FORTESIE's stringent security protocols.
• Esthesis Agent Integration: An Esthesis Agent, provided by European Dynamics, is installed on a local gateway. This agent collects sensor data using the Esthesis Line Protocol (eLP) and transmits it securely (via mTLS) to the Data Sovereignty module (Esthesis CORE). Here, the data is transformed into NGSI-LD format and forwarded to Orion-LD.
• Custom IoT Agent for Proprietary Systems: For backend or proprietary IoT solutions, a custom IoT Agent (rest_to_ELP) is employed. It transforms the data, based on the FORTESIE Data Model, into eLP format. The Esthesis Agent is then used, following the same data flow as described earlier.

Historical measurements are stored though temporal Representation of Entities via NGSI-LD, enabling comprehensive tracking and analysis of data over time. Through the implementation of FORTESIE architecture, each of the digital components provides features with benefits for the end-users involved. More specifically, building performance improvements are accurately measured, documented, and shared between ESCOs and tenants, tailored to specific renovation technologies. By linking tailored energy packages for various target groups with precise building performance and comfort improvements, stakeholders can better understand the tangible results of energy efficiency measures and benefits of efficient, sustainable, inclusive energy use.