The purpose of the AMBASSADOR project is to study, develop and experiment systems and tools that will aim at optimising the energy usage in the perimeter of a district by managing the energy flows, predicting and mastering energy consumption and energy production. The overall goal  is to define and experiment a system that optimises the cost of energy in a district, the cost being expressed in Primary Energy, CO₂or €. The project will investigate energy efficiency both at a building level and at a district level. A number of mechanisms and technical systems will be studied both at buildings and district level for the creation of such a system. The deployment timeframe of AMBASSADOR is around four years. The major part of results should be usable for transfer to development teams at the end of the project.

The main objectives of the project are:

  • To develop a holistic energy optimisation system for a district, taking advantage of the possible shared usage of the local energy production and storage and the complementarity of energy consumption profiles;
  • To develop additional management system functionalities to optimise building energy consumption;
  • To expose building or technical systems flexibilities to the district;
  • To validate through a number of selected scenarios some functions or services proposed by a DEMIS on the three validation sites;
  • To study different business models that can be successfully implemented.

These objectives hold a number of challenges, among them the most evident are:

  • Integrate Optimisation technology at the DEMIS level;
  • Produce the needed models that will lead to an Efficient Simulation;
  • Provide accurate predictions for energy production and consumption;
  • Study Energy production and storage equipment and select some to be experimented;
  • Define the most generic architecture for the DEMIS.

The project will investigate and validate the contribution of some technologies to the energy optimisation objective in a district. The focus has been directed on technologies that are available or will be available at the horizon of the project. There is little interest to study solutions which are too far away from a commercial availability.