ANTS: Artificial Intelligence-driven User-centric Energy Management for Green Sustainable Buildings

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The ANTS project aims to design a framework able to perform real-time optimization of the energy management at the building level through a self-learning, uncertainty-aware and multi-objective intelligent control framework for renewable resources, energy storage, and Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems.

According to the European Environmental Agency, the building sector is a key contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, representing approximately 33% of the energy related EU emissions. The European Commission, to address this challenge and foster a clean and carbon-neutral economy by 2050, has introduced various regulations and policies for the building sector, to encourage the utilization of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs), improvements in insulation and weatherization of buildings, as well as the used Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) and heat-pump technologies, leading to Zero Net Energy (ZNE) buildings.

Towards this end, the project’s partners will design, develop, and deploy the ANTS Cloud Platform, an energy management system that targets buildings with renewable generation and storage systems, where advance analytics for all parts of the building (i.e., Battery Energy Storage Systems, HVAC, load profile, Indoor Air Quality, occupants’ comfort profile, etc.) will be utilized to enable seamless automatic real-time control and scheduling of the BESS and the HVAC system to achieve minimum interaction with the energy grid, cost-effective utilization of renewable and storage resources, while ensuring a comfortable and healthy indoor environment. At the same time, the platform will also provide actionable decision support for the building’s user/owner in terms of key building utilization changes and/or refinements to guide user input for further energy savings and cost reductions.

Therefore, the ANTS project outcomes will bring multiple economic, societal, and environmental benefits, such as the wider adoption of renewables and green practices, the reduction of the energy exchange with the power grid, which eventually will lead to an equal reduction of the energy wastes for the energy transmission and the increase of sustainability in sectors with huge energy costs.

In this project, KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence at the University of Cyprus is collaborating with three small medium enterprises, PHOEBE Research and Innovation Ltd acting as the project’s coordinator, Wise Wire Energy Solutions Ltd, and Lelantus Innovations Ltd.

The ANTS project is co-funded by the Cyprus Research and Innovation Foundation / Programme RESTART 2016 – 2020 / I. SMART GROWTH / CO-DEVELOP under Grant Agreement CODEVELOP-REPowerEU/1223/0078.