The quality of construction works also has a direct impact on the quality of life of Europeans. Not least, the energy performance of buildings and resource efficiency in manufacturing, transport and the use of products for the construction of buildings and infrastructures have an important impact on energy, climate change and the environment. Following this, decarbonising Europe’s building stock is one of the 4 interlinked pillars in the focus of EU clean energy research and innovation to build a low-carbon, climate-resilient future. Significant actions following COP21 Paris Agreement have been started aiming to develop across all sectors ground-breaking technological and non-technological solutions, capable of achieving carbon neutrality and climate resilience in the second half of this century in Europe and beyond. Therefore, a sustainable construction sector plays a crucial role for reaching the EU’s long term 80-95% greenhouse gas emission reduction objective. The objective of SPHERE is to impact in both levels: during construction (reduction of time and costs) and during operations (reduction of CO2 , reduction of the energy gap between design and operation, IAQ): – During operations, this is translated into smarter controls which are closer to the ideal (as assumed during design), reduced user interactions (idiosyncratically we are not taught how to be energy efficient), improved detection of performance deviations and better decision support in general. In summary, the more autonomous the building is the more efficiency it operates. – During construction, while we wait for the advent of a fully robotic construction process, the whole process (for design to commissioning) is still highly dependent on human interaction. Here ICT systems are at disadvantage since their full potential is only exploited when users both, interact with it continuously and properly interpret the information provided. During design, few options are developed since they are time consuming to generate individually. Additionally, different tools are normally used by different professionals during the various phases and information, instead of flowing between tools, is manually copied repeatedly which is time consuming and error prone.

In Sphere, R2M’s sustainability, Engineering and ICT units are involved: Regarding sustainability, R2M will collaborate in tasks related to ISO50001 consulting, LEED certification, sustainable design consulting for retrofits and new construction, renewable energy system design, building energy simulation, fault detection and diagnosis and IPMVP planning and assessment. Engineering unit will leverage its structural health monitoring consulting and drone inspection services and the ICT unit will collaborate with ICT Platform Requirements and KPIs definition and Demonstration The combined competence of R2M divisions include market analysis, business model development, license agreements, IP protection and the leveraging of multinational business development mechanisms. R2M is SPHERE’s innovation manager (R2M), Market Analysis, Exploitation, Standardisation and Impact Maximisation work package leader and will support in the Dissemination and Communication and different technical and demonstration tasks.