RenovAlte, a Franco-German project based on AI for the energy renovation of buildings

At the "AI Village" held from May 17 to 20, Germany and France, which had launched the joint JPA "AI for Risk Prevention, Crisis Management and Resilience" on February 3, 2021, announced €17.5 million in funding for the five selected projects, RenovAIte, which aims to boost the renovation industry with AI, is one of them. Launched by the Vinci Group, this program began in March and will offer OpenSource tools as early as 2025. The Franco-German consortium RenovAIte brings together six entities of the VINCI Group around Leonard (Eurovia and Roadcare, VINCI Energies and Qivy, the environment research lab, VIA IMC, RESALLIENCE), the Action Logement group, the German AI research laboratory OFFIS, and the company ALEIA, a specialist in IT infrastructure dedicated to AI, a member of the European sovereign cloud GAIA-X. It relies on data related to construction (BIM - Satellite, photogrammetry, etc. ...) and AI solutions to offer interoperable solutions for the renovation of buildings and roads. RenovAIte officially launched its work in March 2022 during a presentation organized at Leonard:Paris, the Vinci Group's laboratory, which hosts, among others, Leonard, a platform for foresight and innovation, and was presented on May 18 at the "AI Village" of the Global Industrie exhibition.

Energy renovation, a contribution to the ecological transition

In France, 17% of the French housing stock is considered to be thermal flats, and nearly 2 million properties rated F or G on the energy performance diagnosis (DPE) scale will have to be renovated to remain in the rental market. According to Aleia, the efforts made in recent years by governments and individuals (changing windows, for example) have yielded few results The consortium has identified AI and data as solutions to integrate cost and adaptation data related to the environment. Action Logement, a major player in social housing in France, will rely on data from NamR, a French deeptech company created in 2017, specializing in the analysis of masses of publicly available data. The data employed by NamR comes from data.gouv, regions, geoportal of urbanism, ...) as well as ADEME, Airbus, IGN, Cerema,..., thus including satellite, aerial images and are automatically updated. Its algorithms based on Deep Learning, Computer Vision and the rules of the building sector will be able to inform on the most suitable renovation works for the building. On the other hand, AI technologies bring new technical tools to carry out financing plans and studies of renovation projects. The Adversarial Resilience Learning tool, developed by the OFFIS laboratory to resist cyber attacks, is applied to urban renovation for RenovAIte. RenovAIte will provide relevant solutions for the renovation of buildings and roads that will be very useful to the project owner. The software will cover the entire value chain, from data acquisition to decision-making tools for design offices, housing and road management departments of local authorities. Translated from RenovAlte, projet franco-allemand basé sur l'IA pour la rénovation énergétique des bâtiments