On 7 September, the kick-off event for the pioneering ForeSightNEXT project took place in Berlin, which, as a flagship project within the SmartLivingNEXT technology programme, will set a milestone for the use of artificial intelligence in sustainable and user-friendly digital services in the residential building sector. In this project, funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), the IT service provider Materna is responsible for creating a vendor-neutral, sovereign and trustworthy data space for AI-based smart living services. Together with eight core partners, and under the leadership of the Electrical Engineering Research Association at ZVEI e. V., Materna will implement the ForeSightNEXT platform – along with the AI-based applications built upon it – over the next three years. As a flagship project, ForeSightNEXT lays the foundation for further SmartLivingNEXT satellite projects planned from 2024 onwards across all areas of application within smart living.
The owner-, tenant- and climate-friendly use of buildings and the digitalisation of the private living environment will play an important role in the future. In particular, it is necessary to intelligently control electricity and heating demand. However, there is also demand for digital services to improve home care, residential safety and living comfort.
The ForeSightNEXT project, which has now been launched, is creating the technical and economic conditions for developing innovative services using artificial intelligence in the residential sector, based on secure and trustworthy data exchange, by developing a sovereign data ecosystem. European and German data protection laws, as well as the standards of the European Gaia-X initiative, are key to this, ensuring that data owners retain control over their data and that the data can be used across different manufacturers and systems. The data collected and aggregated is used, amongst other things, by housing and property companies to inform investment decisions. It can also be used to produce forecasts for the heating transition, to advise on policy decisions – for example, regarding renovation or funding requirements – and to support planning processes at federal and state level within the framework of heating planning.
Development of AI-based Smart Living Services
In addition to setting up the data space on a sovereign cloud infrastructure, Materna will act as a data federator in the project, supporting the development of AI-based applications for energy management in the residential sector. These applications include, on the one hand, mobile apps that enable residents to proactively monitor their energy consumption and costs, as well as receive forecasts and consumption tips to help them save energy. On the other hand, an energy efficiency data portal is being developed for cross-building energy efficiency and heating planning. For the first time, the portal will bring together real-world consumption data with data on building fabric within a single data space, enabling measures – particularly those relating to heating planning – to be assessed in terms of their actual expected savings potential.
From 2024, the technical platform is to be provided by ForeSightNEXT and gradually rolled out for testing across several satellite projects within the BMWK’s SmartLivingNEXT technology programme. These projects are developing digital services based on the Smart Living ecosystem to improve energy efficiency, home care, housing safety and living comfort.
Furthermore, community projects are planned with partners from the public sector and industry that will apply the ForeSightNEXT standards. Currently, more than 85 companies and institutions are members of the ForeSight Community, the largest national network for research in the field of Smart Living.
Materna is a key partner in the implementation of ForeSightNEXT
ForeSightNEXT brings together eight consortium partners: BEENIC GmbH, C&S Computer und Software GmbH, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, the Electrical Engineering Research Association at ZVEI e. V. (consortium lead), GSW Gesellschaft für Siedlungs- und Wohnungsbau Baden-Württemberg mbH, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Materna Information & Communications SE and Novus Software GmbH.
Thomas Feld, Vice President of Data Economics at Materna, is looking forward to tackling this forward-looking project together: “Materna has already successfully implemented a number of major data economy projects. These include, for example, the Mobility Data Marketplace (MDM) and data ecosystems for connected mobility such as Gaia-X 4moveID and Gaia-X4ROMS (Remote Operation Management Services). We are looking forward to exciting new use cases in the field of smart home living. With our sector-neutral perspective and in-depth experience in developing federated data spaces, we at ForeSightNEXT bring data providers and data users together as trusted and neutral partners to generate innovative and climate-friendly solutions for the future.”
Michael Schidlack, consortium leader of ForeSightNEXT, says: “We are proud to have secured such a competent partner as Materna for the project. Together with the entire consortium, we will thus make a strong mark on the future market.”
