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Project summary:

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.

Project objectives:

The overall vision of INHERIT is to co-design, develop, demonstrate, validate and replicate next generation solutions for sustainable, inclusive, resource-efficient and resilient CH, 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 and behavioural practices. We will enable socially innovative and cost-effective interventions at different urban levels (buildings and 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. Next generation solutions will be derived using a social, scientific and technological process, as follows:

• Social layer: Approaches from Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) will contribute to the project’s ambition to produce research evidence and ‘real world’ impact for more resilient societies, where CH is subject and same time a catalyst of positive change in local and regional regeneration processes and of social innovations. We will develop a co-creation process, based on Social Labs and Multistakeholder Forum, to identify the needs, issues, challenges presented in each proposed renovation plan and extract their social value based on the citizens’ feedback.
• Scientific Layer: The INHERIT technical inspection methodology for heritage buildings will set-up a EU common approach to carry out a digitally-based and heritage-friendly inspection, proposed from early stages, to make stakeholders to cope with the complexity of achieving a balance between sustainable building performance (environmental, budget, time) and heritage values preservation. It will be complemented by the INHERIT Assessment & Monitoring Framework that will evaluate the CH sites across 4 key pillars: (1) Energy Performance & Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ); (2) Resource efficiency, circularity and Life Cycle Cost (LCC); (3) Resilience to climate & human-made hazards; (4) Accessibility, inclusiveness, openness & socioeconomic sustainability. Finally, the INHERIT Hub of measures inventory will follow a four-principle design to include acceptable, affordable and viable solutions that allow addressing the renovation of heritage buildings in a cost-effective and comprehensive manner. The Scientific Layer will be complemented by state-ofthe- art models and algorithms, such as AI-based algorithms, (big) data analytics (incl. historical and archival findings, remote sensing, and satellite measurements), Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods and robustness analysis frameworks.
• Technological Layer: By combining these models and algorithms with Heritage Building Information Models (H-BIM), Digital Twins, Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR) technologies and Data Space connectors, we will provide a Smartification & Data Exchange Platform, and a wide range of decision support services related to the heritage-built environment’s life cycle that can be flexibly tailored to different CH sites’ needs.

Role of ICCS:

ICCS (participating through the Decision Support Systems Lab) will be the Scientific Coordinator and more specifically, it will contribute as follows:

• Task 4.3 - “monitoring, operation and management services” (task leader)
• WP5 - “Demonstration of INHERIT towards sustainable & resilient CH” (WP leader)
• Task 5.1 – “Implementation plans and continuous tracking” (task leader)
• Services implementation – “s.0 Heritage buildings smartification & data exchange”, “s.3 Decision support tool for optimal renovation planning”, “s.4 IEQ and thermal comfort optimization”, “s.5 Energy forecasting and intelligent management”, “s.9 GIS-based solution for sustainable heritage maintenance TRL”.