- Tell us about RINA. What is your core business and role within the project?
RINA is a global corporation that provides engineering and consultancy services across the Energy, Marine, Certification, Transport & Infrastructure and Industry sectors. In the framework of iBECOME, RINA-C will cover the role of the Innovation and Exploitation Manager evaluating suitable exploitation strategies to bring iBECOME technologies to the market. The team will be also in charge of the development of algorithms for non-energy services for the healthcare management to be integrated in the iBECOME platform as well as will also support the retrofit activities of the Italian demo.
- Why did your organisation get involved in the iBECOME project? How does this activity fit with the normal business of your organisation?
RINA-C will bring to the project its strong expertise in the engineering consultancy of energy and non-energy services in the building and industrial sector. RINA-C has a proven experience in helping its client in developing new products and services and that is exactly its aim within iBECOME project: making the iBECOME vBMS a competitive product on the market.
- How will the outputs of the iBECOME project help drive the sustainability agenda?
iBECOME project has the aim to anticipate and augment the digitalization, decarbonization and decentralization of the energy system developing a scalable and modular Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that will operate as a powerful virtual BMS. The v-BMS will integrate several energy and non-energy services that will have a direct impact on building owners, occupants and end-users on: i) energy savings, ii) better and less costly operation and maintenance (O&M) of heating, cooling and energy systems, iii) increased wellness and productivity and potential for new revenue streams from new energy services without losing the comfort levels.
- What are the technical challenges your work in iBECOME is trying to overcome?
Working on Innovation and Exploitation aspects, RINA-C team will support the partners in developing proper exploitation strategies of the different energy and non-energy services for both retrofit and new buildings. An intensive market analysis is needed to evaluate, for each service, the most promising market considering specific customer segments (ESCO, Facility Manager…), business models (SaaS, B2B, B2C…) and field of application (retrofits, intelligent buildings…). Making such services innovative and attractive for different stakeholders is a big challenge.
- What positive impacts will the projects have when complete?
The increase of intelligent small buildings and the development of technical solution to increase the interconnectivity in the larger buildings/facilities will help the adoption of the new emerging services in the areas of energy management, optimisation and demand response. Different stakeholders (building owners, ESCO, Facility Manager, users) will be able to exploit iBECOME innovations to enable a more efficient management and control of building thanks to the optimisation of: energy performances, comfort conditions and flexibility potential.
