SmarThor – the cloud data platform for the Open Thor Living Lab provided by EnergyVille
SmarThor is a performant central cloud data platform built on MS Azure that collects and stores relevant data related to the Open Thor Living Lab environment. It is developed & maintained by VITO & KU Leuven.
The goal of SmarThor is to support research and innovation by making the data of the Open Thor Living Lab available in a secured way (API’s, dashboards) for different kinds of stakeholders: Researchers, Policy Makers, Facility Managers, Industry.
SmarThor facilitates analytics and optimization testing by bringing hardware, software and users together. This supports optimizing designs, products and investigating future value chains.
The platform will evolve and grow with new additional features, available data and integrations.
The SmarThor cloud data platform collects and stores all relevant data related to the Open Thor Living Lab environment for a long period. This data not only consists of infrastructure data (f.i. sensor data) but also on other external data as Fluvius, Elia, weather, ENTSO-E, ..
The advantage of such a platform is that all data is consistent, centralized stored and accessible in a uniform way. A portal is available as central point to the platform consisting of documentation, access to API’s & dashboards. This will unburden f.i. researchers & industrial companies so they can focus on their real work / added value like developing & testing algorithms instead of spending time for getting consistent data from different places.
By using SmarThor as default energy data space for projects, the IT deployment for projects is faster and projects can benefit from features developed in earlier projects.
The further evolution of the SmarThor platform will align with investments in Open Thor Living Lab and add state-of-the art energy systems, their data, features and support specific dashboards, integration with products, algorithms, external systems etc.
Some examples of projects that use SmarThor are oPEN Lab and Hume. Via SmarThor EFRO new digital services will be investigated to offer rich context open data and to support algorithm testing by industry on Open Thor Living Lab energy systems.
Communication will be done & workshops will be organized to determine concrete needs from the different stakeholders to use this platform.
The role of EnergyVille
A mixed team of VITO & KUL people is working closely together to manage the SmarThor data platform.
This includes f.i. adding new data sources, features, dashboards, but also support the daily operation of this platform (validation & consistency of all data streams) and keeping the platform performant, cost efficient and up to date with the latest MS Azure changes.
Partners
