Eco-efficiency made in Portugal

The initial idea behind this project came from Ecoinside, an eco-efficiency spin-off company created by the University of Porto. The company wanted to develop an IT platform to support their auditing methodology and for that they challenged INESC TEC, the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto and Intelligent Sensing Anywhere (ISA) to form a technological partnership.

But the platform ended up supporting more than auditing: the Ecoplanner includes information on energy and water consumption, gas emissions, fuel and manufacturing costs, among others. It’s about “dealing with the complexity of information and existing data in an industrial unit and making it easier to manage”, explains José Correia, a researcher at INESC TEC.

The data are loaded using the systems present in the company. For that to be possible, it is necessary to previously develop interfaces for these systems, defining which data will be received by the Ecoplanner and the formats. After this customisation stage, the information is received automatically.

A simple decision support software

"The Ecoplanner is a complete decision support tool". Other than producing a set of monitoring outputs (which can be compared and visualised in different time windows), the tool makes it possible to simulate in real time the eco-efficiency impact of any change in the industrial unit. The software also contains a module that makes it easier to write reports and other official documents, gathering the necessary data and producing texts based on predefined templates.

These functionalities can be used by all types of users in a company in the most practical way possible. In that sense, the app is customisable in terms of available indicators and warnings, but then it separates itself from other solutions because it can be used in a browser, so only Internet access is required to use the Ecoplanner at any location.

"The success of the platform will be confirmed when it is in fact used by real people in real companies", warns José Correia, guaranteeing that a lot of effort has been put on usability issues.

The project that led to this platform started in 2011 and was concluded in May 2013. Right now, after implementing the platform in a partner company that followed the entire development process, the challenge is moving on to the market. 

Ciência 2.0, 26 July 2013