Closing the Gap Between Energy Efficiency and Occupant Comfort: Introducing ECO-I

ECO-I: Energy and Air Quality Optimisation Interface

Aspa Kellari, AI Engineer

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Energy efficiency and occupant comfort are too often treated as separate problems in building renovation. ECO-I, designed and developed by CORE Innovation Centre within the Horizon Europe project INPERSO, brings the two together in a single, open API platform. Here is what it does, why it matters, and how we built it.

The Problem

Buildings account for approximately 40% of energy consumption in the European Union and are responsible for around 36% of energy-related CO₂ emissions. Despite ambitious renovation targets embedded in the European Green Deal and the Renovation Wave strategy, the rate of deep energy retrofitting remains well below what is needed. A key barrier is the absence of integrated, data-driven systems that simultaneously address energy efficiency and occupant comfort - two goals that are often treated in isolation by existing solutions.

Traditional building management and energy monitoring systems suffer from fragmented data pipelines, proprietary interfaces, and limited analytical capabilities. They collect data but rarely act on it intelligently, and they rarely account for personalised comfort or indoor air quality. The result is a persistent performance gap between the theoretical efficiency of retrofitted buildings and their real-world operation.

The Solution

To close this gap, CORE Innovation Centre designed and developed ECO-I (Energy and Air Quality Optimisation Framework), within the Horizon Europe project INPERSO. ECO-I is a RESTful API platform that integrates data from Wireless Sensor Networks (developed by IRIS), Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) monitoring (developed by EPFL), and CORE-IC's own Multi-Stage Energy Consulting System (MuSECS) – an AI-driven engine for energy optimisation and Asset Health Monitoring. Together, these components form a single, interoperable interface that turns raw building data into automated, actionable decisions.

Why Existing Solutions Are Insufficient

Most current platforms either focus narrowly on energy monitoring without indoor environmental quality awareness, or they offer proprietary ecosystems that do not interoperate well with heterogeneous sensor networks and third-party analytical tools. There is no widely adopted, open, RESTful interface that unifies real-time IoT data ingestion, AI-driven energy forecasting, dispatch optimisation, anomaly detection, and IEQ index computation in a single platform accessible via standard APIs.

Why Now

The convergence of affordable IoT hardware, cloud-native infrastructure, and mature machine learning frameworks has made it feasible to build precisely this kind of integrated platform at scale. The INPERSO project, with its three geographically diverse European demo cases, gave CORE IC the real-world context and data to design, deploy, and validate ECO-I under realistic building renovation conditions.

The Technology at a Glance

What ECO-I Does

ECO-I is a cloud-hosted, RESTful API platform, architected end-to-end by CORE, that acts as the central integration layer for building energy and comfort management within the INPERSO project. Beyond MuSECS, the platform ingests supporting data from a wireless external sensor network and environmental databases across the three demonstration sites – energy meters, air quality sensors, and similar sources – via dedicated ETL pipelines into a centralised time-series database. This supporting data feeds directly into MuSECS's analytics and forecasting functions.

Data and analytical outputs are exposed through REST API endpoints grouped by function:

• Raw Data Endpoints: direct access to sensor measurements from the demo sites.

• Energy Insights Endpoints: statistical summaries derived from historical consumption data.

• Energy Optimisation Endpoint: streams MuSECS's live optimisation results.

• Asset Health Monitoring Endpoint: streams MuSECS's anomaly detection and condition-monitoring outputs.

• IEQ Optimisation Endpoint: exposes IEQ index scores and improvement suggestions from the project's environmental monitoring pipeline.

• Authentication Endpoint: manages secure access to the platform.

The primary consumer of these endpoints is the INPERSO RE Suite platform, which uses ECO-I's outputs for renovation planning and building performance monitoring. The open API also allows integration with third-party tools and future project extensions.

MuSECS: The Intelligence Engine Behind ECO-I

While ECO-I is the platform, MuSECS is the intelligence that makes it proactive rather than passive. Designed and developed in-house by CORE IC, MuSECS is a holistic energy management system built to operate across the entire lifecycle of a building – from the construction or retrofit site, to day-to-day operation.

MuSECS is structured around four core capabilities:

•     Data analytics: ingesting and enriching real-time process data (energy loads, on-site renewable generation, storage levels, grid pricing and mix, weather) with external sources, so that every decision the system makes is grounded in both live conditions and contextual knowledge.

•     Forecasting: predicting energy demand and generation with high accuracy, enabling the system to anticipate needs rather than react to them.

•     Energy optimisation: solving the optimisation problem to select the most cost-effective mix of energy sources and storage scheduling at any given moment, weighing operational cost, renewables use, and CO₂ emissions against real-time pricing and consumption constraints.

•     Asset Health Monitoring (AHM): continuously tracking the condition of critical building assets (HVAC units, storage systems, generation equipment) in real time, and applying anomaly detection algorithms to flag deviations before they become failures.

Target Users and Sectors

ECO-I is designed for building renovation projects that involve heterogeneous sensor ecosystems and require intelligent energy management. Primary target sectors include residential multi-family housing, social and institutional buildings, and any building environment undergoing deep renovation. The platform is equally suitable for energy service companies (ESCOs), building owners, and research institutions conducting performance monitoring.

CORE's Technological Contribution

CORE Innovation Centre served as the lead developer and architect of ECO-I, taking end-to-end responsibility for the system design, technical implementation, and documentation. CORE designed the overall ECO-I architecture, integrating heterogeneous data sources, internal processing services, and analytical outputs into a unified, interoperable platform. Rather than building a monolithic system, CORE's approach was modular and service-oriented, making each capability independently accessible through the REST API and composable with third-party tools. The deliberate use of open standards (REST, JWT, MQTT, InfluxDB, etc.) rather than proprietary protocols ensures ECO-I is replicable and adaptable to future building renovation projects beyond the INPERSO context.

Alignment with CORE's Values

ECO-I reflects CORE Innovation Group's broader strategic direction of applying data science, AI, and digital engineering to real-world infrastructure challenges. Building on established expertise in applied research and Industry 4.0, CORE Innovation Centre designed ECO-I as an interoperable, standards-based platform – not a one-off solution, but an architecture that can be replicated and extended across future building renovation projects. CORE's participation as lead developer in INPERSO demonstrates its capacity to take end-to-end technical responsibility in complex, multi-partner environments, coordinating integration across heterogeneous systems and partners.

Beyond the INPERSO project, ECO-I strengthens CORE IC's positioning as an innovation and technology partner in the energy and building environment sectors. By simultaneously addressing energy optimisation, occupant comfort, and equipment health monitoring, the platform supports the EU's objectives while showcasing CORE Innovation Group's ability to deliver technically rigorous, production-ready systems with measurable real-world impact.