SmartLivingNEXT onboarding: experience report from wowiconsult GmbH

Part 2 – wowiconsult GmbH is jointly responsible for the implementation of the energy efficiency use case in SmartLivingNEXT flagship project. Based on the standardized onboarding, the consortium partner was able to connect important residential building and energy data to the SmartLivingNEXT Dataspace with little time and resources. The return on investment: the company now has access to other residential building data and can therefore provide an improved data service offering for its customers.

Overall, the personnel required for the standardized technical SmartLivingNEXT onboarding process was very manageable. The main steps could be completed within a few days. The greater effort for wowiconsult as an SME was incurred in the context of internal preparatory work, which was necessary due to the individual data processing strategy. In principle, the effort required for the technical preparatory work can vary depending on the use case and the individual starting situation of a company. Important preliminary work by wowiconsult included the development of a data exchange hub to collect the data from the company-specific legacy systems and bring it into a standardized and usable data structure for the smart living market. With the help of the developed data exchange hub, energy-relevant building data can now be enriched with meta-information and subjected to automated quality assurance. This ensures that no unstructured and implausible data records enter the data room and are processed incorrectly.

“As the process progressed, a Helmchart was implemented to install the EDC Connector and the endpoints of the EDC Connector were configured via Ingress to enable external access. To simplify administration, a user interface (EDC UI) was also developed and made available internally. The process requires a basic technical understanding. However, thanks to the continuous improvement of the documentation, less IT knowledge will be required in future,” comments Samuel Hübner, lead developer of the project.

In order to create the technical requirements for the connection to the data room, the company had to set up a technical infrastructure in a cloud computing environment. This included providing a VPN, setting up a Kubernetes cluster and connecting to the existing legacy systems. The mevivo® server, an internal ERP system for managing technical building data, was hosted in the Kubernetes cluster and populated with sample data to test its functionality.

After onboarding: added value and new opportunities for wowiconsult

With the successful completion of onboarding, wowiconsult GmbH, as the data holder for technical building data, can now contribute this data to the data room in the form of “assets” with the consent of the data owners. This gives service providers the opportunity to offer IT services based on this data. Tobias Hensel, Head of Research and Development: “The data connection to an intelligent data room that we have achieved is particularly attractive for housing companies that use our software products, as they can improve the usability of their own databases.”

In addition, wowiconsult can now also view the data offerings and terms of use of other data room stakeholders and process them in accordance with the defined provisions. Hensel: “On this basis, we plan to provide our own data service offerings in future in line with our company profile as a service provider and energy consultant for use cases in technical inventory management. This includes calculation services for developing different investment scenarios for small and large building portfolios. For example, building information can be transmitted to wowiconsult’s data exchange hub via the SmartLivingNEXT data room so that the calculation service can present possible energy and emission reductions through building component renovations in technical and economic terms.”

Next steps: Scaling and expanding the data offering

The connection to the SmartLivingNEXT Dataspace represents an initial milestone that has laid the technical foundations for sovereign data exchange and potential asset offerings. In the next phases, wowiconsult will move from the initial sample data sets to real building data in order to successively expand the range of data and further extend the possible uses. In addition, building information modeling (BIM) data sets will also be integrated in the future. These originate from wowiconsult’s in-house service: capturing and modelling 3D building visualizations using drone and 3D laser scanning. An important goal is to scale the integrated assets and integrate initial service offerings, such as heat consumption forecasts, into the data room.