eco-bot

eco-bot pilots

The eco-bot funcionality is being demonstrated in three European pilots, each representing a different business model and addressing a differtent target group: in Spain (Estabanell Utility Business 2 Consumer use case), in Italy, United Kingdom & Spain (Dexma Building Energy Management System Business to Business use case) and in Germany (SenerCon ESCo Business 2 Business 2 Consumer use case). Please find each pilot described in brief below, or go to the Pilots section for more details.

Utility in Catalonia

Estabanell is a power utility that will offer eco-bot to residential clients during the pilot year. Through eco-bot residential consumers will have access to global and appliance level consumption data, will receive recommendations for better energy efficiency, can easily ask about company procedures and information, and can configure notifications so that they are notified about their consumption. The pilot will allow eco-bot to demonstrate its benefits to end users helping them improve their energy efficiency and to utilities helping them offer more value to their clients with an engaging energy efficiency tool.

BEMS Italy, UK & Spain

The demo case in DEXMA’s EMS, DEXMA Analyse, is a B2B (business to business) use case – this means that Energy Management System (EMS) users, like facility managers, will use the chatbot in order to increase and/or improve the functionalities of the EMS. The Eco-Bot chatbot offers a variety of functionalities for facility managers and/or owners and energy managers such as a recommendation engine that displays the best available recommendation in order to increase the energy savings in the locations managed by the user, league tables to see the 10 best or worst performing locations in the user’s portfolio or set up consumption, cost or carbon emission goals, among other functionalities.

ESCO in Germany

SENERCON has developed the energy management system iESA (interactive Energy Savings Account) which engages over 90,000 users in climate protection campaigns of the co2online NGO. IESA displays the energy consumption cost and emission in charts and tables based on data from energy bills and meter readings entered by users. By using the eco-bot chat box within iESA, users get immediate and easy access to their energy consumption, energy cost and CO2 emissions. Additionally, they can ask eco-bot for energy advice regarding different fields of energy use in a household – an as innovative aspect – they get not only general information but recommendations that fit to their personal attitude and situation.

Introducing the eco-bot project

The new Eco-Bot project video titled “INTRODUCING THE ECO-BOT PROJECT” is now online! See what the project is all about, including selected actual visualizations of some indicative use cases, and please don’t forget to subscribe to the Eco-bot Youtube channel.

eco-bot main technologies & modeling

The eco-bot project will combine advances in state of the art technologies such as natural language processing, energy disaggregation and multi-factorial behavioral modeling.

Behavioral Modeling

UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS IN KATOWICE

The Eco-Bot project will classify already existing socioeconomic energy consumer models derived by European and international research projects, activities and recommendations, and will produce a taxonomy of those models while mapping them to actual market segments. Eco-Bot will build its engagement strategies on a thorough analysis of selected social and cultural factors that are key to shaping energy-saving behaviours among individual and commercial consumers. The Eco-Bot project pays special attention to soft behavioural factors, which is important for shaping desirable pro-ecological
behaviours among energy consumers. This will provide an accurate definition of the behavioural segments of the target groups to be selected for the purposes of the project.

Energy Disaggregation

UNIVERSITY OF STRATHCLYDE

Monitoring energy consumption of individual appliances using individual appliance sensors or submetering in a house or a commercial building is often impractical and expensive, especially since the number of loads in residential and commercial buildings is rapidly increasing. On the other hand, energy disaggregation via Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) offers a non-intrusive, purely computational, software-based approach to separate aggregate load obtained from a single electricity meter into individual appliance loads. Researchers at Strathclyde will focus on tackling the challenges of NILM algorithms suitable for low rate (1-60s) to very low rate (15-60mins) disaggregation of smart meter data.

Natural Language Processing

E R R A

ERRA expands its software solutions, leveraging Natural Language Processing technologies and Artificial Intelligence. Chatbots create a direct personal communication channel that can improve the user experience, facilitate interactions and give valuable insights to the customer needs. In the Eco-Bot project, multilingual virtual agents are built to support the tailored needs of diverse users; electric power utility customers, residential users with smart meters and energy management system users. ERRA's metrics on user interactions allow constant monitoring of the user experience and analysis of performance, thus enable its improvement.

Our first newsletter titled "Introducing the eco-bot project" is online!

eco-bot latest news

Feb, 25

eco-bot: More Energy Savings Account user testimonials

25th February 2021 by

More input in from our German pilot on what Energy Savings Account users write to us about their experience with Eco-Bot: “A chatbot in Energy Savings Account is a great idea, especially if it helps to get the right energy data faster.” “The menu at the beginning is very clear and helps to find Eco-Bot’s […]
Read more eco-bot: More Energy Savings Account user testimonials

Feb, 15

The eco-bot frontend chatbot monitoring tool

15th February 2021 by

Eco-Bot is powered by a monitoring tool that allows the efficient management of all customer conversations. The Front End “Chatbot”, with its monitoring tool, allows reviewing conversations, even in real-time and exploring how the bots are performing. Performance monitoring is possible through analytics on the conversation data and the generation of key metrics that indicatively […]
Read more The eco-bot frontend chatbot monitoring tool
Jan, 29

The Rule Engine

29th January 2021 by

Eco-Bot introduces a new and innovative way to create personalized energy efficiency advice and recommendations for your bot. Our Rule Engine, through an abstract interface, is designed to allow administrators to build their own rules for a specific group of users. The heart of the rule engine system is capable of retrieving needed values from […]
Read more The Rule Engine

Jan, 14

Getting ready to exploit the results of the eco-bot project

14th January 2021 by

The eco-bot team has had the opportunity to attend the online exploitation webinar organized by the work package leader adelphi and an exploitation expert from IDEA-RE under the Horizon Result Booster programme (HRB). The business consultant mentored the members of our consortium on how we will best exploit the results of our project. We thank […]
Read more Getting ready to exploit the results of the eco-bot project
Jan, 13

Dream job in energy data research

13th January 2021 by

Great opportunity to work & study in energy data machine learning & signal analysis as an Early-Stage Researcher (ESR) on the GECKO project under the HORIZON 2020 research framework. The project will target interpretable and explainable Artificial Intelligence (AI) and explore alternative methods to build machine learning (ML) models drawing on the latest developments in […]
Read more Dream job in energy data research

Jan, 4

Eco-Bot project presented to co2online staff

4th January 2021 by

Project partner and German pilot SEnerCon presented the Eco-Bot project to co2online staff and reported on the current status, for example on user feedback: “I find it very good that the EcoBot has been and is being developed, as he/she/it in the final version is an attractive tool for analyzing consumption data as well as […]
Read more Eco-Bot project presented to co2online staff
Nov, 29

Eco-Bot newsletter for residential consumers

29th November 2020 by

A new newsletter was sent to the residential consumers of our utility partner Estabanell, highlighting the benefits of the use of eco-bot for utility customers. Please follow the link to view the newsletter: https://eco-bot.estabanell.cat/newsletter-en
Read more Eco-Bot newsletter for residential consumers

Nov, 27

New eco-bot video

27th November 2020 by

We would like to present the new eco-bot project video presented in the NILM2020 workshop in Nov 2020, demonstrating how eco-bot is providing appliance-level consumption feedback via NILM and a chatbot during our European-wide consumer trials.
Read more New eco-bot video
Nov, 25

5th International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

25th November 2020 by

The eco-bot project was successfully presented by Dr. Lina Stankovic of the University of Strathclyde at the (online) 5th International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring in two sessions: “Explainable NILM” in Technical session 1, and “Evaluation of low-complexity supervised and unsupervised NILM methods and pre-processing for detection of multistate white goods” in the short talks […]
Read more 5th International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

Nov, 2

Second eco-bot German Stakeholder online workshop

2nd November 2020 by

The eco-bot project is organizing the second German Stakeholder Workshop led by our partner adelphi on November 10th 2020 at 11:00 am. Please see the attached invitation (in German) for more details.
Read more Second eco-bot German Stakeholder online workshop