enCOMPASS – Collaborative Recommendations and Adaptive Control for Personalised Energy Saving

Overview

The enCOMPASS H2020 project implements and validates an integrated socio-technical approach to behavioural change for energy saving, by developing innovative user-friendly digital tools to make energy consumption data available and understandable for different stakeholders (residents, visitors, public actors, building managers, utilities and ICT-providers) so to empower them to achieve energy savings and manage their needs in energy efficient, cost-effective and comfortable ways. To this end, enCOMPASS integrates visualisation of energy data collected from smart sensors, user-generated information and context-aware collaborative recommendations for energy saving, intelligent control and adaptive gamified incentives.

enCOMPASS develops an open, extensible, process-based, cloud-enabled platform for energy saving and behaviour change applications, which exploits data sensing from different sources, social computation interfaces, visualization and gamification techniques, context detection, personalized collaborative recommenders, behaviour change apps and open interfaces. This architecture is deployed in a cloud infrastructure, to allow easy application development by third parties following Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) models. This simplifies development and testing, automating deployment to hosted runtime environment, and facilitates providing new services on top of enCOMPASS.

Motivation

enCOMPASS implements and validates an integrated socio-technical approach to behavioural change for energy saving, by developing innovative user-friendly digital tools for making energy data consumption available and understandable for the different users and stakeholders (residents, employees, pupils, building managers, utilities, ICT providers) empowering them to collaborate to achieve energy savings and manage their energy needs in energy efficient, cost-effective and comfort-preserving ways.

It demonstrates how this can be achieved by a novel approach that integrates user-centered visualisation of energy data from smart sensors and user-generated information with context-aware collaborative recommendations for energy saving, intelligent control and adaptive gamified incentives enabling effective and sustained behavioural change.

• Scientific objectives: Stimulate behavioural change for energy saving with a holistic approach integrating innovative digital tools with smart home automation and a full-cycle model of sustained behavioural change. Study social awareness incentives to promote energy conservation behaviours; Create an innovative method to learn and develop models of user behaviour integrating quantitative data, obtained by smart sensors, and qualitative data, collected through an online social participation application; Validate the relative effectiveness of different types of behavioural change interventions for different types of users, in different types of settings and in different climatic conditions. Disseminate our results, in particular fostering trans-disciplinary works involving both ICT and energy researchers.

• Technological objectives: Deploy a modular and scalable ICT platform that integrates a series of components, provide utilities an effective tool for the design and implementation of energy demand management policies to promote efficiency; Improve the resource efficiency and business operations of utilities thanks to the use of the enCompass platform. Promote the adoption of novel ICT solutions in energy management companies.

• Social objectives: Make energy usage data accessible to consumers in a user-friendly, easy-to-understand way. Demonstrate that individual comfort levels can be maintained while achieving energy savings.