Overview
As the built environment continues to face challenges such as climate change, energy consumption, social inequality, population aging, and resource depletion, there is a growing need for sustainable solutions that extend the focus from energy to additional dimensions of sustainability, including environmental, social, and economic factors, and take a life cycle approach to building design, construction, operation, maintenance, and renovation. Lifecycle data of buildings and building portfolios plays a crucial role in helping sustainability decision-making that goes beyond energy considerations for decisions across the various life cycles including design, construction, operation, and end-of-life. However, leveraging the value of such data is challenged by the "datasiloing" problem in building management systems and other building systems due to both technical and business processes, making it difficult to leverage the full potential of data-driven insights. WILSON proposes a ground-breaking approach leveraging semantic data repositories, cognitive digital twins, and decentralized data management to transform the management of buildings and building portfolios. The project has been conceived with the main objective of enabling more efficient and sustainable data use in the built environment by leveraging cutting-edge technologies and innovative management practices. To do so, WILSON will develop a holistic, extensible, and decentralized data mesh architecture addressing data management which will be agnostic to and interoperable with existing, proprietary BMS and Digital Twin Systems. This decentralized system will allow the integration of a suite of solutions focused on enhancing the overall performance of buildings and improved decision-making processes, through: (i) enhanced buildings’ operation by improved planning and management; (ii) evaluation of environmental impact and circularity schemes; and (iii) advanced and more accurate diagnosis and monitoring of buildings. Moreover, the deployment of Personalised Building Data Hubs (PDHs) will connect and integrate all WILSON solutions. Data gathered in PDHs will follow International Data Space (IDS) principles and will be made available to users and key stakeholders to participate in transactions of data and services through a P2P marketplace. Finally, these services will be complemented with an Investment Tool to give stakeholders with in-depth insights to support their decision-making processes on the operation, renovation and installation of green, sustainable assets. With the aim of ensuring and maximizing the project’ impact across the EU, these solutions will be validated and demonstrated in four large-scale pilots with different typologies in 4 European countries: Italy (public district), Spain (coastal hospital), UK (urban mixed district) and Switzerland (rural and residential).
