COLLECTiEF

COLLECTiEF is a 4-year EU-funded project with the goal of responding to the need to review the energy strategies of existing buildings by leveraging on Collective Intelligence (CI) and implementing an interoperable and scalable energy management system to make buildings smarter and upgrade their legacy equipment on a large scale. The project aims to enhance energy flexibility on both the supply and demand sides, mainly focusing on high-energy dense and heterogeneous urban areas, to promote sustainable and resilient urban energy solutions.

To do so, COLLECTiEF is now working on:

• A user-friendly, interactive platform to engage building occupants and manage technical building systems.
• Software and Hardware solutions to efficiently upgrade a wide range of buildings and existing equipment to make them smarter and more advanced at a large scale.
• New business models based on CI.
• Events such as exhibitions, industry workshops and awareness campaigns to collaboratively generate, examine, and present impactful data and outcomes.
• An e-learning platform that enables end-users and stakeholders to independently learn about installing and maintaining the tools.

The project’s approach to the achievement of the objectives is “To make smarter buildings, we need innovative strategies” and is based on 4 pillars:

• Collective Intelligence (CI): a distributed intelligence paradigm that enables scalable energy management in existing buildings, neighbourhoods, and urban systems through collaborative problem-solving and decision-making. CI systems share three key characteristics: adaptation, self-organisation and emergence, allowing them to react quickly and autonomously to changing environments and user needs, including extreme climate events. The exploitation of CI allows COLLECTiEF to promote circular energy flows between interacting processes to maximise interoperability and real-time integration with the electric grid, with scalability based on a node concept to enable fast rollout across Europe.
• Low Cost and Open Source: the project creates affordable low-carbon technologies to optimise energy efficiency and flexibility in existing buildings.
• Occupant-Centric: using an integrated sensor network centred on the user's health, comfort and satisfaction to incorporate individual preferences into energy solutions.
• Case Studies: COLLECTiEF solutions will be implemented and tested in 4 different areas characterised by different climatic conditions and building types.