SOCIO-BEE proposes that community engagement and social innovation combined with Citizen Science (CS) through emerging technologies and playful interaction can bridge the gap between the capacity of communities to adopt more sustainable behaviours aligned with environmental policy objectives and between the citizen intentions and the real behaviour to act in favour of the environment (in this project, to reduce air pollution). Furthermore, community engagement can raise other citizens’ awareness of climate change and their own responses to it, through experimentation, better monitoring, and observation of the environment. This idea is emphasised in this project through the metaphor of bees’ behaviour (with queens, working and drone bees as main CS actors), interested stakeholders that aim at learning from results of CS evidence-based research (honey bears) and the Citizen Science hives as incubators of CS ideas and projects that will be tested in three different pilot sites (Ancona, Marousi and Ancona) and with different population: elderly people, everyday commuters and young adults, respectively. The SOCIO-BEE project ambitions the scalable activation of changes in citizens’ behaviour in support of pro-environment action groups, local sponsors, voluntary sector and policies in cities. This process will be carried out through low-cost technological innovations (CS enablers within the SOCIO BEE platform), together with the creation of proper instruments for institutions (Whitebook and toolkits with recommendations) that will contribute to the replication, upscaling, massive adoption and to the duration of the SOCIO-BEE project. The solution sustainability and maximum outreach will be ensured by proposing a set of public-private partnerships schemes and innovative targeted communication means to streamline exploitation and accessibility to the project impacts.

Buildings constitute a vast, yet currently untapped, source of energy demand flexibility that can provide invaluable services to the energy system. This flexibility currently remains unattainable due to the lack of a technological framework that can connect the multitude of buildings and building systems with the energy system in a cost-effective manner as well as the reluctance of energy consumers to enroll in demand response programs. DRIMPAC offers a comprehensive solution to empower consumer to become active participants in the energy markets. It comprises three main pillars: a) A legacy and Standards-compliant interoperability framework to interconnect building energy loads/appliances and expose their demand flexibility as price-responsive demand to the grid or for market actors to aggregate and bid in ancillary service markets. b) A human-centric, intelligent building energy management system that will lift the burden of demand response from the consumers shoulders and reduce reluctance and fear of participation in DR programs. It will infer user comfort preferences and dynamically control building loads to minimize energy cost and use for the building occupant leveraging dynamic prices, while always preserving comfortable and healthy indoor conditions. c) Innovative business models and service offering for energy retailers in order to facilitate their transformation from commodity suppliers to digital energy service suppliers and kick-start the deployment of the DRIMPAC solution in the market. The DRIMPAC technological framework and business models will be validated by four retailers supplying three energy carriers – electricity, natural gas and district heating – in four different national markets across the EU - France, Cyprus, Germany and Spain. Pilot demonstrations will take place in a range of building types, including residential, office, educational and others, in order to validate the DRIMPAC benefits across most building typologies.

PLIADES advances the SoA dataspaces reference architectures, towards a step change on the use of data as key enabler of technological advances in AI and Robotics. To this end, PLIADES researches into novel, AI-enabled tools to advance full data life cycles integration, both within and between data spaces. Sustainable data creation methods through data compression, filtering and normalization will be developed, to allow efficient and greener storage in a data-oriented future. Data privacy and sovereignty will be further ensured, through standards and decentralized protocols to protect data-producing organizations and citizens. Alongside, data sharing will be revolutionized through novel AI-based brokers and connectors using extended metadata, shaped through the project’s best practices and domain expert’s knowledge. On top of these, active data discovery services through cross domain AI connectors will allow creating linked data spaces, enabling interoperability between previously disconnected entities, while data quality assessment services will facilitate real time data evaluation. Extended synergies with EU initiatives will be established in order to contribute models, strategies and technologies for a Common European Data Space. Our outcomes will be evaluated in six use cases focusing on direct advancements in key AI and Robotics technologies for everyday use, oriented around multiple data spaces; mobility, healthcare, industrial, energy and green deal. Our use cases provide a challenging validation suite involving vast heterogeneous data creation, management and sharing while addressing full data lifecycles in multiple major domains. Through the developed ecosystem, CCAM and ADAS/AD car technologies will be enhanced, HRI for robot operators and healthcare patients will be reshaped, while further advanced, integrated data spaces will be deployed in the healthcare, manufacturing and green deal sectors aiming to reduce carbon footprints and shape a greener future.

An increasing role is foreseen in Europe for local energy communities (LECs) to speed up the grid integration of RES. To-day, the enabling role of DSOs in support of LECs is hampered by a lack of flexibility when planning cost-efficient LEC connections to their network at MV level, and by a lack of digitalization of the LV networks to make LEC’s smart prosumers benefit economically when serving the DSO flexibility needs. Four European DSOs (E.ON, ENEDIS, E.DIS, Güssing Stadtwerke) and an Indian DSO (TATA) have joined with IT-based, innovative product and solution providers, and technology and research centers, to demonstrate the combined roles of innovative functionalities serving the MV and LV networks, when implemented in 5 different regulatory regimes (Austria, France, Hungary, Germany, India- state of Delhi-). For MV networks, a mobile storage concept at substation level is demonstrated in Hungary, Germany and Austria. It enables DSOs to reduce investment uncertainties, avoid hindering future renewables connection and foster the local use of flexibility with participating non-regulated market solutions (Demand Side Response-DR-). For LV networks, 3 functional use cases served by ATOS and Schneider are tested simultaneously in Austria and India with prosumer support: i) Forecasting/scheduling of Distributed Energy Resources for the optimized energy management of Local Energy Systems, ii) Customized, human-centric prosumer participation in explicit DR programs using context-aware flexibility profiles, iii) Grid-forming/islanding capabilities in Local Energy Communities to optimize their energy system resilience. The joint work of DSOS aims at accelerating scaling up and replication tested by HEDNO (Greece) and E.ON (Sweden). Dissemination towards players of the energy value chain recommends business models, possible regulatory adjustments and deployment roadmaps of the most promising use cases, in support of the implementation of the Clean Energy Package.