“Are we ready to be interoperable?”. This was the premise for InterConnect’s final event. Under the motto “Advancing interoperability in the EU Reference Framework”, more than 100 participants gathered in Cologne (Germany) on February 27, at the premises of EEBUS, the German partner responsible for the German pilot, to discuss the project’s results and the future of interoperability.

 

David Rua opened the session, explaining how the project paved the way for interoperability, contextualising what had been done throughout the four and a half years of the project: from defining use cases to using the results of joint exploration in the project’s pilots.

 

Patricia Arsene, project officer of the project and policy officer at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content, and Technology (DG CONNECT) attended the event, providing the EC’s vision on how interoperability must be promoted in the European context. Georgios Takoudis, from EC’s Directorate-General for Energy (DG ENER), also attended the event, highlighting the code of conduct and its role for interoperability and continuity of the project’s actions.

 

 

The first panel discussion, “Interoperability is not an island”, was moderated by Luís Seca, member of the Executive Board at INESC TEC; the session’s participants aimed to provide different outlooks, in terms of research – Fábio Coelho and Josef Baumeister from INESC TEC –, industry – Robert Bohm (EEBUS) and Jo Vandale (Daikin) –, and policy-making– Isabel Gonzalez Cuenca and Nikoleta Andreadou from the Joint Research Center (JRC).

 

The lunch break was mostly used for the technological demonstration of some of the project’s results, namely the solutions tested in four of the seven pilots – German, Greek, Portuguese, and Dutch. The demonstrations took place at the EEBUS living lab.

 

The event focused on the project’s results during the afternoon as well: Lucija Rakocevic from Th!nk-E provided context on how interoperability was implemented on the ground by the seven large-scale pilots. Then, it was time to explore the lessons learned throughout the process and how the future was being prepared. David Rua led the panel discussion which included representatives from all pilots: Darja Skrt Georgiev (CyberGrid) for the overarching pilot; Carlos Damas Silva (E-REDES) representing the Portuguese pilot; Stefano Fava (Planet Idea) from the Italian pilot; Anais Galligani (Yncrea) from the French pilot; Donatos Stavropoulos (GRIDNET) representing the Greek pilot; Thomas Fischedick (KEO) from the German pilot; Ronnie Groenewold (VolkerWessels iCity) representing the Dutch pilot, and Lucija Rakocevic (Th!nk-E), who was also responsible for the Belgian pilot.

 

 

Before the final session, led by David Rua, Josef Baumeister, and Robert Bohm, the participants were able to get to know six of the winning companies from the second edition of the project’s open calls: Local AI, R8, Consensus, SIMON, Linc, and Easy Smart Grid.