Horizon PROBONO

The ambition for sustainable and green buildings across Europe has encountered a number of barriers (e.g., as related to high upfront construction costs, access to capital, social attitudes, lack of information, experience and incentives). To answer the challenges related to the green building market, the Horizon 2020 PROBONO project envisions a people-focused European construction industry working in harmony with the broader community of stakeholders. Here, public authorities and citizens are involved with the purpose to deliver scalable, sustainable, and viable energy positive and zero-carbon green buildings and neighbourhoods.

The project’s ambition is to provide validated solutions for the design, construction, and operation of new and/or retrofitted zero-pollution and positive energy buildings as part of sustainable green neighbourhood developments. The type of neighbourhoods will be piloted across six EU states where the PROBONO living labs will be established.

The living labs will be linked to business and municipality greening plans. More specifically, the six PROBONO living labs will include two municipality driven large-scale demonstrators (Madrid and Dublin) and four living labs representing business/owner promoters of the green buildings and neighbourhoods’ transition (Porto, Brussels, Aarhus, Prague).

Technical University of Crete is mainly responsible for leading the development of Digital Twin Models of Innovations for Smart Green Building Construction and Renovations, as well as the development of Knowledge Graphs and Agent-based modelling towards the analysis and control of complex systems and processes in the Living Labs.

The project involves 47 partners from 15 different countries, for a 5-years project duration (2021-2026). Its total budget is EUR 25,252,011 and will receive a funding from the EU of EUR 20,158,449.