Culture heritage - tangible and intangible - can be understood as a reservoir of creativity, well-being, identity and knowledge that is useful to overcome present and future challenges. The cultural value attributed to our traditional and historic buildings denotes our identity as communities and individuals, playing an important role both in urban and rural domains. The historic building stock is heterogeneous and consists of buildings from different time periods, constructed in different ways with different materials, and also follows different architectural ideals. This situation implies that there is a need for differentiated renovation strategies and targeted policies along the heritage built environment’s life cycle that promote energy efficiency, sustainability, inclusiveness and resource efficiency, while preserving cultural heritage value. The overall vision of INHERIT is to create a systematic methodology, accompanied by leading-edge Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), such as Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and (big) data analytics, and associated social/behavioural practices, towards sustainable, inclusive and resource-efficient CH solutions. INHERIT will enable socially innovative and economic viable interventions at different urban levels (buildings, city/neighbourhood), covering all relevant aspects of the heritage-built environment’s life cycle: (1) Design and renovation; (2) Monitoring, operation and management; (3) Preservation and maintenance. The solutions will be tested in 8 cultural heritage sites across EU. In addition, INHERIT will create a capacity building programme addressing heritage operators and stakeholders (including large companies, SMEs, public authorities, research organisations and citizens) to support sustainable CH with particular focus on NEB community and projects and will work on policy recommendations towards sustainable heritage.

Today's building permit issuance is mainly a manual, document-based process. It therefore suffers from low accuracy, low transparency and low efficiency. This leads to delays and errors in planning, design and construction. Several EU countries have developed attempts to push forward the digitalisation of building permit procedures. But none of these have led to complete adoption of digital building permit processes within municipalities. The aim of CHEK is to take away barriers for municipalities to adopt digital building permit processes by developing, connecting and aligning scalable solutions for regulatory and policy context, for open standards and interoperability (geospatial and BIM), for closing knowledge gaps through education, for renewed municipal processes and for technology deployment in order to reach TRL 7. CHEK will do this by providing an innovative kit of both methodological and technical tools to digitise building permitting and automated compliance checks on building designs and renovations in European urban areas and regions. The CHEK consortium consists of a multidisciplinary team covering GIS, BIM, municipal processes and planning, data integration and standardisation. In addition, the consortium is a multisectoral mix of research&education, AEC- and software-companies, governmental institutions, and international standardisation organisations. The multisectoral and multidisciplinary consortium is essential to align and connect all aspects of digital permit processes required to meet the highly ambitious project objectives. Several partners are already collaborating in the European Network for Digital Building Permit (EUnet4DBP). The institutions in the advisory board, representing governments and municipalities of other European countries, will further assist the development, exploitation, and upscaling of results. The best practices and developed software following the logic of OpenAPI will enable replicability in any other European country.

The European energy system is undergoing a significant transformation: decarbonization, security of supply, deployment of renewables and their integration into the market, generating significant opportunities and challenges for energy stakeholders. Despite all energy efficiency efforts, overall demand for decarbonized electricity is set to be significantly higher in 2050 than today due to the decarbonization of the heating, cooling, transport and many industrial sectors, which can only be achieved via efficient and smart electrification. Hydropower is a key technology in supporting the European pathway to a decarbonized energy system and to achieve global leadership in renewable energy generation. It consists a renewable and highly sustainable electricity resource and can supply the European power system with stability and valuable flexibility. In addition, hydropower reduces EU’s dependency on fossil imports and renders multiple extra benefits for society in the river basins such as support to irrigation, water supply and flood control. The D-HYDROFLEX project will advance excellence in research on digital technology for hydropower paving the way towards more efficient, more sustainable, and more competitive hydropower plants in modern power markets. D-HYDROFLEX will develop a toolkit for digitally ‘renovating’ the existing hydroelectric power plants based on sensors, digital twins, AI algorithms, hybridization modelling (power-to-hydrogen), cloud-edge computing and image processing. The core pillars of the project will be: (i) digitalization, (i.e., digital twins for hydro dams and machinery, weather and flow forecasts, cyber-resilience), (ii) flexibility, (i.e., coordination with hydrogen, storage and VPP operation) and (iii) sustainability, (i.e., biodiversity environmental issues). Validation will take place in real hydro plants of EDF (France), TEE (Poland), PPC (Greece), TASGA (Spain) and INTEX (Romania), covering different geographical areas of Europe.