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Public summary

In the Netherlands, there is still an abundance of occupied dwellings built in the post-war period, with inefficient energy performance contributing considerably to the country’s fossil fuel consumption. Renovating these old buildings is a cost-efficient option aligned with the circular construction criteria to meet Dutch government climate targets. Still, the yearly rate of residential building renovation in the Netherlands is only about 1.3% which is less than half of the minimum required rate set by Article 4 of Directive 2010/31/EU.

Digitalization can significantly influence the acceleration of the renovation rates by eliminating the critical bottlenecks of renovation processes and providing a smooth information flow through the whole renovation process chain. To provide such information flow through the whole renovation chain, a large volume of buildings’ data needs to be collected and aggregated from various public and private sources supported by standardized information exchange protocols.

In this project, a prototype of a data platform was designed and developed using modern open-source software technologies to support data provisioning and relationship management for a large volume of openly available data about the geospatial and physical characteristics of existing Dutch dwellings. The platform’s architecture is designed based on microservices, data mesh, and data virtualization in such a scalable manner that makes the data integration possible regardless of the data source format and structure as long as existing metadata enables establishing relationships between datasets. Moreover, the platform can integrate the third-parties JSON-based APIs while preserving data access and ownership.

The developed data platform prototype in this project is supposed to support specific processes within a digitized renovation workflow identifying the best-suited renovation solutions and clustering similar renovation demands. During the platform development, the geospatial data from publicly available sources, thermal properties, and material characteristics from housing associations were used. Also, from country-wide public LiDAR point clouds and other sources, the digital 3D building models in CityJSON LOD 3 format were created to represent dwellings’ geometries.

Microservices, property graphs, and GraphQL technologies were essential building blocks of the platform development to achieve scalable data integration and relationship management and provide unified query capabilities for the digitized renovation activities. The developed platform was evaluated by providing sufficient data required to calculate dwellings’ heating and cooling demand estimation.

This design project is an important step toward massive data management to enable digitized renovation processes.

Funder: This project is executed by the support of the MMIP 3&4 grant from the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs & Climate Policy
as well as the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations.