The Challenge

This experiment will focus on the challenge of improving the energy efficiency of buildings using data provided by IoT devices. Smart buildings employ a variety of IoT devices that generate data, which support various applications. These data can be valuable for third-party service providers that can collect and analyse them to provide “over the top” services related to the improvement of the energy management and efficiency of buildings. However, the potential of these data is limited by significant security and privacy concerns, as well as by the lack of interoperability across building systems.

The Solution

The objective of this experiment is to enable innovative cross-sectoral services to be delivered on top of vendor and application-specific building IoT equipment. DARE aims at allowing IoT data generated by building IoT equipment to be shared with third-party service providers. The implementation of widely applicable cross-sectoral energy services requires access to two types of data: a) generic data that can be used for training related AI models, and b) consumer-specific, real-time data that can be used for providing tailored services and acute detection of anomalies. Nevertheless, to provide “smarter” services, the sources of data usually considered by existing systems are not enough, instead, additional data related to the consumer context should be provided. Such data can include the number of persons currently in a building, building location, consumer schedule, internal temperature and humidity, and many others that can be generated by smart sensors and IoT devices located inside the buildings. However, these data are sensitive, hence, efficient access control systems must be in place.

DARE provides a solution that leverages Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials, two recent W3C recommendations, and combines them with iSHARE trust services, to build an efficient access control solution. Another obstacle to data exchange associated with this challenge is that data from heterogeneous devices and sensors are often encoded in a device or vendor-specific format. To this end, DARE leverages FIWARE technologies to provide access to digital twins, represented using well-known data schemata, and access using the standardized NGSI-LD API.

Business Projections – Scalability

Efficient energy management of buildings is both challenging and relevant. The recent energy crisis in Europe has shown that new, innovative solutions are required in order to decrease our energy footprint. DARE is anticipated to be a framework that will enable these solutions. But DARE potentials expand beyond this use case. DARE provides an efficient solution to the problem of access control to IoT devices and their data, a problem that has been considered by many institutes and organizations as one of the main obstacles that prevent us from unleashing the full business value of the IoT. Furthermore, DARE contributes to the advance of Self-Sovereign Identification (SSI) technologies, which are being considered in many emerging use cases, such as user identification, supply chain security, cross-border transactions, and circular economy.