The Interconnect Project organised the event “Towards the interoperable energy ecosystem of the future”, in Brussels, to discuss energy sustainability in Europe; the event took place within the scope of the Sustainable Energy Days initiative and it promoted the reflection on strategies to build a sustainable and interoperable European energy ecosystem.The main results of the project – The Semantic Interoperability Framework (SIF) – were presented at the event.

The main goal of SIF is to enable the communication between smart appliances and energy management systems, allowing data sharing between digital platforms from different manufacturers and service providers.

Fábio Coelho, a researcher at the Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC) – together with Laura Daniele, a researcher at TNO -, presented this technological solution, which is based on the concept of semantic interoperability. According to Fábio Coelho, this proposal ” allows the data exchange between digital systems, bypassing the use of syntactic interfaces (API), nor tailored, manufacturer specific implementations”.

“The SIF results from straight collaboration among consortium partners to make interoperability available and sustainable to developers and integrators. Moreover, it will facilitate and have positive impact on cross-sector digital services, particularly in energy-centric use cases”, said Fábio Coelho. In this sense, it drives the communication scenario between different devices, regardless. Interoperable integration allows for the optimisation of associated costs when incorporated into a household energy management service. More specifically, the end-user has the possibility to manage the devices to reduce the associated energy costs. Through the constant process of inferring and extracting data, the network responds effectively to the sustainability of the energy network and user comfort, ensuring the security of related data.

The SIF is a technology common to all seven pilots taking place in Europe – Germany, Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands, Greece, France, and Italy.

The event also focused on sustainable solutions to improve the use of energy in Europe, towards the digitalised power grid of the future, resorting to solar panels for consumption, and the provision of electric vehicle chargers when consumers purchase them.

The session was promoted by David Rua, coordinator of Interconnect and researcher at INESC TEC, and was also attended by Svetoslav Mihaylov from DG CONNECT, Angel Tarramera and Hrvoje Foretic from the Joint Research Centre (JRC), Milenko Tosic from Vizlore, Robert Bohm from EEBUS, Josef from Bosch Siemens, Miguel Gonçalves from Schneider Electric, and Alberto Dognini from RWTH Aachen University.

At the end of the event, the participants had the opportunity to visit a technology exhibition, which demonstrated how interoperability works in the sustainability of buildings and appliances, and how it can be applied in the future.

The video of the event is available here.

The InterConnect project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 857237.