IMR Commence work on EU Research Project – iBecome

IMR Commence work on EU Research Project – iBecome

Late last year a consortium of companies, of which Irish Manufacturing Research was one, won the bid to implement the proposal titles iBECOME  ‘”Intelligent Building Energy Assets Control for Comfort, Energy and Flexibility Optimization’.

What is the project about?

The iBecome Project aims at demonstrating a combination of novel technologies and new business models for optimizing buildings energy performance and comfort conditions, while reducing the operational costs. It is made up of a consortium of ten organizations, including IMR, who will work together over a four year period to complete this ambitious program. During this time the developed systems will be fully deployed in two demonstration and two retrofits sites.

iBECOME both anticipates and augments the digitalization, decarbonization and decentralization of the energy system. By utilizing engineering fundamentals tools and sophisticated data analytics techniques it processes and transforms building and operational data into commodities that can be monetized through the offering of energy services in the framework of innovative business models. Particularly, iBECOME will demonstrate the functionality and viability (technical and economical) of a virtual BMS platform deployed as a ‘Software as a Solution’ (SaaS) solution that can optimise the energy performance, comfort conditions and flexibility potential of buildings and facilities while allowing 3rd parties to interconnect for providing other energy or non-energy related services. The virtual BMS will utilise a calibrated physics-based simulation model to allow accurate predictive control for energy and comfort optimisation, flexibility maximisation and precise M&V for both implemented Energy Conservation Measures (ECMs) and Demand Response (DR)

From an operational perspective, data from various sources (building energy and management  systems, energy markets, weather forecasts, service providers  etc) will be warehoused in a central location. The combined application of data analytics to gain useful insights into the data, modelling to develop digitized versions of the buildings and machine learning techniques to develop automatic and anticipatory responses will provide a broad controlling architecture for the buildings. This will enable an operational environment that can be engaged with along a continuum from suggested manual-response to fully automated control, and, facilitate third parties to provide numerous ancillary services through an Application Programming Interface (API). Taken together, it means that an extended range of factors and services can be taken into consideration when operating a building, while doing so in a very energy efficient way and paying for it through the application of new business models, such as on demand services, energy performance contracting and demand side response arrangements. The projects capitalizes on the relative maturity of sensoring and data collection technology, energy metering, competitive energy markets incorporating renewable energy, availability of building services on an SaaS basis, while adding specific advances in data analytics, building modelling application and machine learning techniques.

For more information contact  john.mullaney@imr.ie

iBecome H2020 projectThis project has recieved funding from H2020-LC-SC3-2018-2019-2020 (BUILDING A LOW-CARBON, CLIMATE RESILIENT FUTURE: SECURE, CLEAN AND EFFICIENT ENERGY)