Case study
From simulation to reality: The Green Village's data platform as an engine for innovation
Green Village is a unique field lab in the Netherlands. In this ‘living lab’ on the campus of TU Delft – with housing, infrastructure and residents – scientists and companies test new technologies, systems and products in a realistic environment. The Green Village Data Platform, designed and developed by SURF, plays an important role in this.
Key facts
Who: Joep van der Weijden and Marijn Leeuwenberg
Position: project manager and data manager The Green Village
Organisation: TU Delft / The Green Village
Challenge: Efficient management and administration of the large amounts of IoT and research data generated at The Green Village.
Solution: The Green Village's data platform, an innovative IT solution that collects, monitors and provides real-time visibility of data for researchers, companies and collaboration partners.
Project manager Joep van der Weijden and data manager Marijn Leeuwenberg deal with the enormous data flows that go to the platform on a daily basis. For example, they perform the necessary security checks and support researchers in making the data transparent.
Joep van der Weijden, photographer: Iris Klop
Green Village is the ideal place for research into sustainability and energy, Joep explains. "The realistic environment makes the researchers’ experiments very valuable, because they can test their innovations in practice." Researchers can use various measuring instruments and technologies on the site, such as moisture sensors in the ground, measuring equipment in the open air or innovative installations in buildings.
"If you have developed a new type of heat pump, for example, you can test here whether the pump performs just as well in a real home as it does in a laboratory," Joep explains. "As soon as something is not working properly, residents can report it directly via an app group. This is important input for the researchers and companies involved, and it helps us to quickly adapt and improve the systems."
Challenging IT solution
"Our biggest challenge was to build an IT solution that brings together the data from all these different research projects and makes it accessible to stakeholders," says Marijn. "We're talking about large amounts of IoT data about energy and energy management in a built environment. Think of energy consumption of buildings, indoor climate, weather information, soil moisture and temperature, and the presence of people in a building. SURF has realised this solution with the Green Village Data Platform, in which all this data comes together.”
The platform brings together data from various sources within the Green Village in a single uniform format. The platform is public and supports research projects in the storage, processing and monitoring of data. It also offers innovative possibilities for sharing data in real time and visualising it in dashboards and graphs.
Marijn Leeuwenberg in a room at The Green Village, where researchers can test their innovations in practice
Stable, scalable and secure
To keep all these processes running smoothly, the data platform uses three main services:
- Apache Kafka, which allows large amounts of data to be integrated and processed in real time.
- InfluxDB, a time series database that enables long-term storage and analysis of data.
- Grafana, which translates the raw data from InfluxDB into comprehensible graphs and dashboards, allowing researchers to easily present their data to others.
The combination of these functionalities makes the platform stable and scalable. Access via SRAM – SURF's authorisation and authentication system – ensures strong security and a pleasant user experience. Users retain control over their data: they decide which data sets they share and who has access to specific data.
Real-time sensor data
Eleonora Brembilla is one of the users of Green Village. She is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology, where she conducts research on the effect of daylight in and on buildings. "Green Village is a fantastic facility for my research," says Eleonora enthusiastically. "People work and live there, so the buildings are constantly in use."
She explains why this is so valuable. "I used to work a lot with computer models and simulations. These are often highly simplified representations of reality, because they have to be easy to apply in practice. However, the real conditions in and around buildings are much more complex. In Green Village, I can collect data via live sensors that I have installed throughout the site. This data provides insight into the actual environmental factors."
"Green Village is a fantastic facility for my research. People work and live there, so the buildings are constantly in use."
Snowball effect
Eleonora's sensors record the amount of daylight, measure the incidence of light on the buildings and calculate the reflection of different surfaces. "On the platform, I can visualise this data in graphs and share it with other researchers. I can also give companies involved in projects in the Green Village access to the data so they can use it for the development of. For example, digital twins or smart control systems for buildings. The data platform makes my research data directly applicable."
Both inside and outside the Green Village, the possibilities of the data platform are leading to valuable collaborations. "Within my network, many colleagues are interested in the data on the platform," Eleonora explains. "This is creating a snowball effect, which leads to new collaborations with other research groups."
Sustainable innovation
For Joep and Marijn, the coming years will be dominated by the growth and optimisation of the data platform. Marijn explains: "An important goal is to map the entire Green Village site and fully integrate all aspects, such as energy and climate data, into the data platform." Joep adds: "We want as many parties as possible – companies, researchers, students – to start using the data platform so that it becomes the standard for data analysis in sustainable innovation."
Eleonora applauds this intention. "The Green Village Data Platform is an innovative IT solution that facilitates endless opportunities for collaboration. A platform where research and practice come together. That is enormously valuable for scientists."
If you are interested in using the Green Village Data Platform, you can contact Joep van der Weijden or Marijn Leeuwenberg. Are you looking for a similar solution for your research project? Contact SURF Cloud Research Consultancy and discover how we can help your research.