The DisRUPT Me (Digital Skills and Research for Urban Planning Through Metaverse) Doctoral Network will train early-stage researchers in developing integrated human-centric digital twins of smart cities’ infrastructures, processes and stakeholders, and their applications to reaching the net zero goal in all major urban activities (including mobility, energy, safety and waste management). Digital Twins are virtual models designed to reflect real world entities and to be used in simulations, visualizations, and data-driven diagnoses to optimize those entities. Smart cities operate on large, time-varying, and heterogeneous data, in records of processes and human interventions, through distributed sensors and actuators connected in real environments via the Internet of Things. This opens the way to the mining of Digital Twins that are amenable to simulation-based prediction and what-if scenarios exploration, as well as Artificial Intelligence-based system diagnosis, multi-objective/criteria optimizations, and real-time monitoring and control. These models can interact with public decision-makers as well as private operators and citizens through Metaverse-based human-digital interfaces, thus allowing human-centric immersive experience, improved engagement and better perception and management of the urban issues. The Digital Twin research area consists in formalizing and developing such integrated infrastructures, and regularly updating them with data continuously collected. The DiSRUPT Me environment is intersectoral, interdisciplinary and international as it implies associating researchers in engineering sciences, and engaging researchers in social and human sciences, as well as business players, with willingness to consider the multi-sectoral effects of public policies on territories and populations in a globalized context. DisRUPT Me aims to create a doctorate programme that offers an access to a variety of facilities, ensures the career development of young researchers and exchanges on a European level. It has 5 beneficiaries, recruiting 10 PhD students who will cross-fertilize with nationally/locally-launched Digital Twin programs in which the consortium partners are all currently engaged in order to turn their campuses into living laboratories and incubators for developing, testing, validating and disseminating new ways to address major environmental, social and economic transition issues. Researchers trained in the DiSRUPT Me network will have a unique combination of interdisciplinary skills provided by the domain-specific expertise of the project partners, highly enhancing their employability both in the public and the private sectors. The interdisciplinary and well-balanced skills learned will be transferable, and the network will promote gender balance, ensure equal training opportunities, and encourage the involvement of women in science. It will also allow mutualizing partners’ knowledge, skills, and research outcomes contributing to scientific advances on an emerging and yet to-be-well-established technological area. By providing a risk-free testing environment for simulating alternative policies to improve city management, the efforts in the DiSRUPT Me network will allow public authorities reveal policies that underperform and identify leverage points for interventions that may succeed, thus significantly saving cost. Moreover, since the solutions defined will be open to the ecosystem, they will help citizens experience public services better and faster, while companies will have a perfect sandbox to experiment the development of new services and business models.

Today over 41 million EU citizens are unable to access essential energy services and suffered from energy poverty. This led the European Commission (EC) to consider energy poverty a major societal challenge. In Bosnia and Herzegovina around 70-15% of households are found to be energy poor. It is well recognized that solving of energy poverty problem can have multiple benefits on health, air quality, comfort, and well-being, and improved household budgets, boosting economic growth and prosperity in the region. Solutions for energy poverty are related to the search for energy efficiency, which calls for long-term sector specific interventions, focusing on several causes of energy vulnerability and affecting other policy areas, such as energy justice, social, health, economy, CO2 emissions reductions, and other macroeconomic areas. Solving this problem in any country demands close cooperation among different sectors: research, technology, policy, law, innovation, sociology, and economy. That is why solutions for eliminating energy poverty require an innovative, interdisciplinary, and structural approach with strong cooperation across countries and across sectors. ENPOWER will lead the transformative change in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) to strengthen the scientific reputation, attractiveness and networking channels of the University of Banja Luka (UNIBL) through supporting its innovation and research excellence in energy poverty and justice energy, sustainable buildings, energy efficiency, smart energy, human capital development, and application of innovative approaches, co-creative solution finding with business and policy makers, as well as in involvement of different ecosystems of innovation through the newly formed Building Advisory System Living Lab (BAS-Lab), which will be developed through cooperation with distinguished EU partners with established scientific excellence.