Information for Stakeholders

You can now have an impact on the design of your future building tools!

Are you working in the building sector?

If so, your voice is very important to us: we want to hear your opinion on the types of solutions we consider offering in the future. The CHRONICLE tools and services will offer features that are likely to be of interest to professionals like you. If you are a professional working in the building sector, such as an architect, engineer, consultant, energy service company, facility manager or building owner, please fill out the survey to share your needs and wishes.

Your responses are important in helping us to develop products and services that meet the day-to-day needs of people working in the industry.

The deadline for the survey is 30 October 2023.

CHRONICLE is using new building information modeling (BIM) technology that enables understanding the whole life cycle of a building.
We are developing
tools and services for:

  • Monitoring building energy consumption, to ensure that the building conditions are maintained as expected
  • Monitoring building conditions, such as indoor air quality and thermal comfort
  • Detecting possible maintenance needs of building equipment
  • Having a tool for renovation planning
  • Optimising for life cycle cost and carbon emission reduction in renovations
  • Understanding the life cycle CO2 emissions of the building
  • Storing building related data and information safely in a digital building logbook

Who is it for?

The CHRONICLE solutions will have a diversity of features that will be of interest to professionals working in different fields of the building sector, among others:

Facility Managers (FM)

Energy Service Companies (ESCO)

Professionals within Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations (AECO)

Other professionals (OP) e.g. building owners

Residents (RES) e.g. tenants, owners

The Project Objectives

CHRONICLE envisions the development of a holistic building performance assessment framework extending throughout all building phases. The aim of the project is to promote the transformation of existing or new buildings into the highly efficient and fully digitalized buildings of the future. The project objectives are:

Dynamic and fully digitalized processes

CHRONICLE will develop a powerful Digital Twin mechanism, accurately simulating building performance based on real-life data collected through a smart device network installed on site for the continuous monitoring of building operations.

Efficient and targeted building maintenance & renovation

CHRONICLE will deliver a suite of tools which will enable different stakeholders to monitor and maintain their building in a proactive manner and create a renovation roadmap tailored to their building’s needs increasing the effectiveness of the selected interventions while reducing financial risks.

Performance assessment beyond energy

The building performance evaluation in CHRONICLE will be based primarily on its energy consumption but further investigate a wide selection of environmental, financial, comfort, well-being, and social aspects, throughout the building lifetime.

Enhanced user experience through a set of comprehensive applications

On top of its powerful tools and calculation mechanisms, CHRONICLE will also develop comprehensive user interfaces aiming at a wide list of stakeholders, created in close cooperation with the end users through a co-design process.

Building digitalization through a data governance framework

The CHRONICLE Common Data Environment and Digital Building Logbook will provide a robust framework for secure and interoperable governance of building data and milestone information throughout the building’s lifetime.

Innovative business models

To evaluate its technological solutions and advanced services, CHRONICLE will investigate a number of use cases and applications towards defining innovative business models for the relevant stakeholders.

The CHRONICLE Use Cases

1. User friendly Performance Evaluation

These Use Cases aim to demonstrate the evolution of traditional EPCs to user friendly tools for building owners, tenants, investors and other stakeholders. CHRONICLE’s enhanced performance evaluation will be delivered to the end users through comprehensive UIs which will illustrate a wide range of information depending on the end users’ profile. The multi-dimensional assessment of building performance will include dynamic operational rating in terms of energy, cost indicators, environmental impact and human-centric aspects including actionable recommendations to enhance the building’s efficiency.

2. Operation monitoring, optimization and maintenance

CHRONICLE will showcase a wide range of functionalities that compose a powerful tool for facility managers to efficiently monitor the day-to-day operations of their buildings and proactively plan the necessary maintenance activities in a time- and cost-efficient manner. These functionalities will be based on a continuous measurement and verification framework which allow the accurate performance evaluation, forecast and operation optimization of the building processes.

3. Renovation scenarios for enhanced building performance

The group of CHRONICLE Use Cases referring to building renovation scenarios will demonstrate how the advance tools delivered within the project will perform a long-term performance assessment, expanding over decades after a renovation. For each renovation scenario under the microscope, CHRONICLE’s Renovation Planner & Investment Appraiser will offer a roadmap of the building’s evolution in terms of energy performance, well-being and comfort as well as its potential financial impact. This will allow the stakeholders involved (building owners, ESCOs etc.) to de-risk their investments, reduce the building’s operational expenses by promoting energy efficiency actions, and further reduce its carbon footprint, improve its comfort and provide a proactive maintenance roadmap per renovation scenario.

4. Digital building logbook

The group of use cases related to the Digital Building Logbook will demonstrate the benefits of this powerful tool for different stakeholders. The Digital Building Logbook developed in CHRONICLE will act as a systematic, dynamic and secure data management platform which will allow different stakeholders to access building-related data and visualize critical milestones in the building lifetime towards increasing efficiency, interoperability and trust between multiple services within the building sector.

The CHRONICLE Services & Tools

CHRONICLE Common Data Environment

CHRONICLE will deliver a semantically enriched and BIM-based Common Data Environment (CDE) and relevant data governance services to ensure the efficient management of both static and dynamic building information. CHRONICLE’s CDE enables the management and collaboration of project information throughout the lifecycle of the project. The CDE will facilitate the sharing, management, and storage of data that is relevant to the various CHRONICLE stakeholders, such as AEC, building owners etc., and respective CHRONICLE tools. CDE will ensure that authorized users involved in the project have access to the most current and accurate information, and that the data is consistent, reliable and secure.

CHRONICLE Digital Twin Framework

CHRONICLE’s Digital Twin framework acts as the spine of all the project’s activities, aiming to accurately model and simulate the building’s processes based on real life data, monitoring buildings operations and environmental conditions, collected through an IoT network installed on site. Combining powerful building thermal modelling techniques and machine learning algorithms, CHRONICLE’s DT Framework will accurately forecast the behaviour of the building’s conditions and systems. It will additionally mimic the behaviour of the building occupants to bridge the simulation gap and provide an accurate and representative building model, continuously calibrated based on current IoT data streams.

Renovation Planner

The Renovation Planner Tool is designed to help building professionals and homeowners plan renovations of buildings and dwellings. It will help to assess various renovation scenarios of the building, focused on optimizing its energy performance. Furthermore, the tool will present a complete financial assessment per renovation scenario proposed, while also evaluating other important factors like the tenants’ comfort and carbon emissions. Depending on the parameters that the user chooses to prioritize, the renovation planner will give a list with the best scenarios to proceed.

Each proposed scenario will contain and describe a renovation roadmap with concrete renovation measures to be applied. Continuing on from the selection of the preferred renovation scenario by the user, the Renovation Planner will also issue a building renovation passport (BRP) which will include and present all the details about future building inspections, maintenance and renovations in a pro-active manner based on the expected service life of the components, systems and materials to be used and applied during the renovations.

 

Investment Appraiser

The Investment Appraiser is a tool that will be developed to forecast value and liabilities related to buildings’ performance as well as energy saving investments. Together with the other Chronicle applications, it will provide support to the stakeholders of the AEC Industry and its inhabitants.

The first part of the Investment Appraiser aims to support a property (building) valuation, performing a Life Cycle Cost (LCC). The application consists of a backend solution that performs LCC according to literature proven cost KPIs. This includes Dynamic Costs for instance, those associated with energy or water consumption and Static Costs as of those associated with Building Materials for renovation scenarios.

The second part of the Investment Appraiser oversees calculating the Carbon Bill for both the Base Line of each pilot and the generated renovation scenarios. According to the UC3.2 the Carbon Bill is an associated cost that measures the impact of emissions and sets an economic magnitude according to a standardized quantity.

Performance Evaluator

The Performance Evaluator is an application that captures not only the actual and post-occupancy data, but also the simulated outcomes from the Digital Twin. End-users will be able to monitor building operations (e.g. energy consumption, heating loads, indoor air temperature) as well as receive recommendations in terms of energy, cost and comfort.

In general, the Performance Evaluator serves as the data analysis system supporting the functionalities of both ChroVieOcc and ChroViewPlus. It plays a crucial role in effectively assessing building usage and advise the users on how to improve the overall energy performance.

3D Visualization & Monitoring Platform (ChroViewFM)

This online BIM-based tool enables (i) the three-dimensional (3D) visualization of the building and (ii) the monitoring of near-real time data from smart equipment installed on site, such as energy consumption, environmental conditions, and other performance indicators. These include energy usage analysis, costs, CO2 emissions, indoor air quality and tenant-user’s comfort. ChroViewFM’s dashboard allows the user to track the building’s energy use and comfort levels and, eventually, identify any significant changes over time. To this end, ChroViewFM provides notifications of upcoming maintenance activities and warnings of any unexpected behaviour of the building equipment, thus facilitating the building’s predictive and preventive maintenance. Finally, it offers a user-friendly 3D visualization tool, where the user e.g., Architect/BIM modeler, FMs etc., can upload actual or hypothetical BIMs of a building of interest.

Digital Building Logbook

The Digital Building Logbook (DBL) is an information repository for all relevant building data. It allows to store, organise, manage and trace information and data throughout the whole building’s lifecycle. It is a valuable resource for building owners and stakeholders (AECO, FM, OP ) to observe the evolution of the building based on trusted information and it facilitates decision making. The DBL bridges the gap between the great amount of data and information generated during the building’s life cycle and the lack of methodologies and tools to safely manage, organise, structure, and share this data.

The building information, milestones and data can be archived in one, secure place where it will be accessible to authorized parties in the long-term. The CHRONICLE Digital Building Logbook offers intuitive features (such as a timeline of the building’s lifetime) that supports the involved stakeholder’s decision making on critical decisions regarding the building management. It will offer multiple ways of searching for and managing data. Through the communication established with the Common Data Environment of CHRONICLE, results and information from other CHRONICLE solutions will be automatically stored in the logbook. The system uses blockchain technology to guarantee the integrity and traceability of your data. 

Residents App (ChroViewOcc)

This mobile app will allow building residents understand and improve their energy consumption, transforming performance rating from an administrative document to a useful and comprehensive tool for the actual building tenants. Apart from insights on current energy performance, the app will provide indicators related to comfort and health conditions (e.g. air quality) per household as well as insights on the current ambient conditions, depending on the smart devices installed on site. It will also provide actionable suggestions on improving energy efficiency based on actual information collected per household, for example how to adjust the setpoints of the cooling or heating devices, how to consume energy when the production from renewables is maximum etc. This will result to tenants actually improving the energy efficiency of their home, further resulting to reductions in their energy bill.

APP for Professionals (ChroViewPlus)

The primary objective of ChroViewPlus is to assist Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) and Facility Managers (FM) in offering them expert recommendations and in-depth insights to effectively reduce energy consumption.

The user interface will be designed to analyse various operational strategies and their respective impacts on the overall energy performance of the building. The final application examines real-time system patterns, compares them with forecasted behaviours and provides recommendations for identifying opportunities to save on costs.

Overall, the interface will enable ESCOs and FM to achieve significant cost savings. By doing so, they will not only minimise maintenance expenditures, but also gain the capability to comprehensively assess and present the environmental impact of various operational strategies.