Engineering

Modular Big Data Applications for Holistic Energy Services in Buildings

MATRYCS is an EU-funded project aiming to elevate building energy management and boost its efficiency through improved data processing, analysis and aggregation and to bring upon state-of-the-art results.

About

About

MATRYCS will deliver big data applications providing comprehensive energy efficiency services in buildings and improving building operation and infrastructure design. MATRYCS will also create an open reference architecture for smart energy-efficient buildings to align advanced architecture and vocabularies, allowing Business-2-Business sovereignty.

The challenge

With buildings accounting for nearly 40% of EU energy consumption, the building sector should play a key role in effective climate policy. The constantly increasing momentum of big data and their related technologies constitutes an unprecedented market opportunity for improving the energy efficiency along the building sector and its lifecycle and for better managing energy consumption and generation at building level. More and more data are being generated within buildings nowadays, due to the increasing adoption of leading-edge technologies hence contributing to move forward towards a smart building landscape.

The overall vision of MATRYCS is to define and deploy a Reference Architecture for Buildings Data exchange, management and real-time processing, and to translate this Reference Architecture into an Open, Cloud-based Data Analytics Toolbox.

This Reference Architecture will enable AI-based cross-sector analytics for smart energy-efficient buildings, based on seamless data-information-knowledge exchange under respective sovereignty and regulatory principles.

To support this challenge, EGI contributed offering the federated and distributed resources to deploy the Reference Architecture for Buildings.

The solution

The Infrastructure layer encompasses all the sensors, meters, IoT devices as well as other data hubs or data sources that generate the (raw) data as input to the MATRYCS ecosystem.

The MATRYCS-GOVERNANCE contains all the software components necessary for the collection of the raw data, their preprocessing, cleaning, curation and management. At this level, raw and possibly unstructured data are thus transformed into enriched data structured according to the chosen syntactic and semantic models.

The MATRYCS-PROCESSING layer includes all the components for the training, validation and running of the ML and AI tools used to carry out advanced data processing and the transformation of data into more elaborate information.

The MATRYCS-ANALYTICS layer provides the toolboxes with the building applications offered to address specific use cases, together with the associated visualization tools and user interfaces. Here, the applications can use and assemble different pieces of information offered by the processing layer for creating complex knowledge.

The Security layer is a cross-cutting layer that spans over all the other layers with the scope of providing the software technologies and the framework necessary to guarantee the security of the building ecosystem at all of its levels.

The three layers of the MATRYCS Reference Architecture take advantage of the capabilities provided by the EGI Federated Cloud Infrastructure through an efficient resource allocation and effective definition of scalable and flexible analytics services. Thanks to the support offered by EGI, the resulting MATRYCS Toolbox is expected to have a significant impact on the building sector and its lifecycle, as it will have the ability to be utilised in a wide range of use cases under different perspectives, including, but not limited to:

1. Monitor and improve the energy performance of buildings;

2. Facilitate the design and development of building infrastructure;

3. Support policy making and policy impact assessment;

4. De-risk investments in energy efficiency.

Cloud computing offered by EGI played a key role to advance the development of the data-driven reference architecture for scalable big data management and analysis of energy-efficient smart buildings.

Services provided by EGI

The three layers of the MATRYCS Reference Architecture take advantage of the capabilities provided by the EGI Federated Cloud Infrastructure. Thanks to the support offered by EGI, the resulting MATRYCS Toolbox is expected to have a significant impact on the building sector and its lifecycle, as it will have the ability to be utilised in a wide range of use cases under different perspectives, including, but not limited to:

Monitor and improve the energy performance of buildings;
Facilitate the design and development of building infrastructure;
Support policy making and policy impact assessment;
De-risk investments in energy efficiency.

Solutions offered by EGI played a key role to advance the development of the data-driven reference architecture for scalable big data management and analysis of energy-efficient smart buildings.