Big Energy Data Value Creation within SYNergetic enERGY-as-a-service Applications through trusted multi-party data sharing over an AI big data analytics marketplace

Project Information

SYNERGY

Grant agreement ID: 872734

DOI

10.3030/872734

Project closed

EC signature date 11 November 2019

Start date 1 January 2020

End date 31 December 2023

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 12 611 316,31

EU contribution

€ 9 929 240,00

Coordinated by

ETRA INVESTIGACION Y DESARROLLO SA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - SYNERGY (Big Energy Data Value Creation within SYNergetic enERGY-as-a-service Applications through trusted multi-party data sharing over an AI big data analytics marketplace)

Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2023-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The European electricity sector is undergoing a major fundamental change with the increasing digitalisation, roll-out of smart meters and wide penetration of RES, IoT devices, distributed storage and EVs.
Efficiency requires much automation; machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Edge and Cloud Analytics to drive automation processes will become more important. Consequently, the need for “end-to-end” coordination between the electricity sector stakeholders, not only in business terms but also in exchanging information between them is becoming a necessity to enable the realization of the high level objective of increasing electricity networks’ stability and resilience, while satisfying individual operational optimization objectives and business case targets of all stakeholders involved either directly or indirectly in such optimization processes of continuously increasing complexity and uncertainty. New controllability variables are introduced in the management and optimization of electricity networks, affecting fundamental operational parameters and increasing network management complexity. However, recent studies have pointed out that electricity sector actors are reluctant to make the move due to high upfront costs and sheer complexity of data.
SYNERGY introduces a novel framework and reference BD architecture that leverages energy domain data from diverse sources (APIs, historical data, statistics, sensors, weather data, energy market, etc) to help the electricity value chain stakeholders to simultaneously enhance their data reach, improve their internal intelligence on electricity-related optimization functions, while getting involved in novel sharing / trading models of data sources and intelligence. SYNERGY enables the transition from traditional master/slave schemas to more complex synergies (enabled by the SYNERGY Big Data Platform and AI Analytics Marketplace) to deliver added value analytics applications and innovative energy services to the involved stakeholders towards serving their individual interests, while realizing common electricity sector goals for de-carbonization, power quality and security of supply.
Data analytics services will be made available through a BD AI Baseline Analytics Service Marketplace, in which hybrid encryption, multi-party contract management and multiparty computations play an instrumental role. Through the marketplace, electricity sector stakeholders will have the opportunity to benefit from advanced AI Big Data Analytics which will essentially correlate and analyse incoming data streams from the various stakeholders’ systems to generate new insights and knowledge. On top of the SYNERGY Big Data Platform and AI Analytics Marketplace, a bundle of innovative energy applications and services will be configured, addressing the business and optimization needs of the variety of stakeholders.
On the business side, SYNERGY will define and validate a new ecosystem of data-driven intelligence for the provision innovative synergetic services, accompanied by respective business models for the electricity value chain actors, based on the principles of the data sharing and exchange approach.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Preliminary activities for the SYNERGY Foundations concerning the WP2 tasks about business scenarios and definition, detailed architecture design together with the specifications of communication protocols and interfaces. Parallel activities have been carried out in collaboration with demo partners in order to perform a deep audit at pilot sites. Through this analysis, critical information about energy infrastructures and assets have been collected, and an extensive data assets survey has been performed. This activity will be followed in WP8 deployment and integration tasks.
A second line of work has been focused on the SYNERGY Integrated Platform,in WP3 and WP4, where the involved partners have worked on the definition of a common information model, the backbone of the platform itself (including all the security and privacy mechanism), the services for big data ingestion and management and open APIs. In addition, a beta-release of the SYNERGY Data Analytics Workbench has been achieved as weel.
A third section of activities is related to the development of the services and applications included in WP5, 6 and 7. These activities have started in M10 and in the first period it is planned to achieve a preliminary design of the three tool-suites (with a detailed functionality specification)and the launch of the development activities.
In WP9 and WP10, C&D Plan, together with a preliminary exploitation strategy have been performed. During this first period the consortium have work to establish the most common actions for the visibility improvement (website, conferences, social network, etc.) and the establishment of synergies and collaboration with similar projects (participation at Bridge Initiative, BDVA, etc.). As first results, a preliminary business model and market analysis have been achieved.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Existing solutions used by stakeholders suffer from isolation problems as they mostly operate in silos with proprietary data, thus not allowing for integration for the creation of new knowledge to complement the existing but limited intelligence. Data confidentiality, privacy protection as well as IPRs further hinder the ability to integrate and exchange information in a trustful and transparent manner.
SYNERGY will deliver an integrated analytics engine and marketplace as-a-Service through Open APIs to cope with the increasing requirements of big data and complexity inbetween stakeholders interaction.
Several energy analytics solutions have been recently launched providing Building Energy Reports and High-level Analytics and Benchmarks to facilitate awareness and expose consumers to variable energy tariffs, while projecting positive behaviours through comparative feedback mechanisms and generalized guidance interfaces. However, most tools focus on feedback on the basis of mere energy data that is difficult for consumers to understand and generate value. SYNERGY aims at effectively tackling such gaps through a novel holistic flexibility management and control framework built on the basis of robust and efficient comfort/discomfort modelling techniques that allow to precisely estimate the real-time comfort parameters and calculate demand flexibility towards optimizing energy management at the building and district levels. Innovative personal AI analytics techniques will be exploited for the extraction of thermal and visual comfort models, considering consumers as dynamically interacting entities within their environment and thus fusing heterogeneous indoor ambience data along with the evidence captured exclusively from the observation of users' control actions under specific context conditions.
The lack of trust in multi-party data sharing, the uncertainty about data ownership and access, privacy and infrastructure limitations are often listed as main concerns. SYNERGY will advance the state of the art in trusted and fair data sharing through the definition of multi-party data contracts. Through its expressive data contract and data attribute formalisations, its rich provenance metadata and its solid DLT-based monitoring mechanisms, SYNERGY will proactively resolve IPR issues pertaining to all data-enabled assets, including batch and real-time data streams, integrated data analytics and data derivatives.

Conceptual Representation of the SYNERGY Framework integrating the electricity value chain into a

The SYNERGY Solution from a big data management point of view