Icon Smart Living

Practical example and current challenges

  • The "Smart Living" ecosystem is developing rapidly. 23 million rental apartments in Germany could be equipped with intelligent devices and AI-based services. Today, smart living still comprises completely separate trades that will in future interact in cross-domain applications. These applications require intelligent, situation-adaptive buildings that fit seamlessly into comprehensive structures.
  • A prerequisite for such AI-based services is consistent data acquisition, processing and networking. This requires a secure, scalable and high-performance cloud environment that also includes local edge devices. Companies in the housing industry want to offer intelligent services, automation solutions, etc., and in return store and process customer data flexibly, transparently and in some cases locally in Europe (DSGVO room).
  • Transparency and easy to use settings where data is located and what can be done with it are required. The data is often personal and sometimes health-related, i.e. highly sensitive. This includes, for example, the recognition of activities, usage habits, presence and emergencies. Other scenarios, such as predictive maintenance for building technology, are less sensitive or not sensitive at all. GAIA-X must offer configuration options for these scenarios.
  • Data from smart homes must be merged with data from the building and its technical installations for numerous applications. Automated buildings should be monitored as easily as possible for maintenance requirements and technical problems. The combination of occupant-specific smart home installations, intelligent household appliances, etc. in conjunction with their specific clouds and other manufacturer-specific clouds for building technologies with data from the tenant management make demands on a sensibly structured, secure and reliably available data management.
  • In addition, high availability requirements up to 100% up-time for critical smart-living services such as emergency detection, fire protection, etc. are required in building services engineering.
Smart Living

What added value does the "GAIA-X project" offer?

  • GAIA-X offers the housing industry easy and secure access to a multifunctional cloud environment in the GDPR space (e.g. data storage, machine learning, semantic description, pattern recognition, predictive behaviour).
  • GAIA-X connects regional and functionally specialised (storage, certified security, performance, AI, etc.) data centres and thus supports the task-specific scaling of smart-living applications that are dedicated to edge computing due to high latency requirements.
  • GAIA-X facilitates suitable standardisation requirements for linking the growing volumes of data and thus promotes the emergence of further AI applications, particularly through cooperation between the digital economy, housing industry and electrical industry.

Use Case Team

  • Anke Hüneburg – Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers’ Association (ZVEI) for the ForeSight project
  • Jochen Schäfer – Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers’ Association (ZVEI) for the ForeSight project
  • Dr. Hilko Hoffmann – German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
  • Kerstin Bergmann – Bosch
  • Thomas Feld – Strategion
  • Dr. Claus Wedemeier – Federal Association of German Housing and Real Estate Companies
  • Kerstin Hausmann – Aareon