Improving environmental sustainability through AI-based explanations of events in complex systems

While Austria is striving to achieve (inter)national sustainability goals, 70% of its greenhouse gas emissions are caused by critical infrastructures such as transportation, energy industries, and buildings. Modernizing these infrastructures so that they are more efficientlyrun is an important approach for increasing sustainability. Additionally, Austria is making major steps towards rolling out green technologies at scale (electric vehicles (EVs), local energy communities (LECs), renewable energy sources (RES)). Yet, user acceptance of these technologies plays a critical role in their diffusion. To sum up, ensuring that key infrastructures are efficient and user friendly can translate into sustainability gains and ultimately contribute towards the country’s energy sovereignty.

Thanks to recent advances in digitalization, the infrastructures mentioned above rely on complex systems that interconnect real and digital assets, known as cyber-physical systems (CPS), for example smart grids and buildings. As CPS are becoming increasingly complex and dynamic, their transparency, in terms of why certain system events happen, diminishes. This hampers (technical) system operators in running the system safely, economically, and efficiently, and it also reduces user-friendliness at a time when (system) transparency is demanded by end customers or even legally required.

The SENSE project

Started in early 2023, the FFG-funded SENSE (Semantics-Based Explanation of Cyber-Physical Systems) project investigates how explanations of CPS events could improve CPS transparency, contributing to increased efficiency and user-friendliness and impacting sustainability. The project relies on Artificial Intelligence techniques such as knowledge graphs and deep learning to provide explanation services. SENSE is guided by two use cases in the smart grid (with the emerging topics of EVs and LECs) and smart building domains from Austria’s largest smart city living lab. The demonstrators developed as part of the project will be the basis for user studies that will provide data for assessing the impact of CPS explanations on sustainability through newly developed economic evaluation models. The project aims to demonstrate that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced by 15%, thus addressing sustainability goals on climate action (UN Sustainability Development Goal SDG13). These reductions can be achieved by contributing to sustainable, less polluted cities relying on LECs and the use of EVs (SDG11), ensuring affordable clean energy (SDG7), and contributing to Austria’s energy sovereignty.