More and more buildings have central communications systems and the Computer Integrated Building is slowly becoming a reality. In recent years the number of office workers has increased significantly in parallel with global urbanisation, whilst in furthermore more and more people are working from home, which together with the recreational use of the Internet also means that many homes have an Internet connection for professional use. The SMART-ACCELERATE project addresses the barriers to the effective use of IT for energy management in SMART buildings. The focus is weighted towards large office type buildings, but since the residential sector is also of major interest, cross fertilisation is encouraged by studying the impact on the residential sector of the barriers under study.

Again, whilst the project will focus on the energy management aspects (RUE), SMART buildings by their very definition also incorporate many RES (in the form of both active and passive systems which need to be controlled by the building automation). Hence the project addresses the problem of systems integration.

The proposed project is divided into six inter related phases.

Some of the definitions regarding SMART buildings are reviewed and refined, to permit more accurate analysis and development of the market plan for this sector. Within this definition, a methodology for evaluating SMART building performance is developed from an existing matrix methodology for evaluating IT effectiveness in energy management. The objective is to incorporate the knowledge of the barriers to effective implementation of SMART buildings technologies into the evaluation process, firstly to develop a tool which will be used within the project, and secondly to finalise this tool for use by market actors after the completion of the project.

Secondly, and based on the initial outcomes of the first phase, the project investigates, identifies and collates the behavioural, technological, economic and regulative barriers to the adoption of SMART buildings technologies. In parallel with the second phase, the third phase of the project looks at selecting the existing buildings which are used to study the barriers and to refine the specifications of the dissemination methods and tools to be used.

The fourth phase of the project concerns the actual study - interviews, audits and building performance evaluation - of the selected case studies, to look at the positive and negative aspects of SMART building performance and hence feeding back into phases 1 and 2.

The fifth phase of the project is the creation, testing, implementation and dissemination of the developed tools, whilst a sixth and final phase of the project looks at the effectiveness of the proposed action based on the response to the dissemination actions.