SmarThor: Digital backbone of the Open Thor Living Lab

Abstract

With energy systems becoming increasingly data driven, the need arises for dedicated, long-term, and stable data-sharing infrastructures to further facilitate research and innovation. This case study paper presents SmarThor as the digital backbone of the Open Thor Living Lab, an infrastructure environment where research meets industry, citizens and governments to develop, integrate, and test innovative energy solutions in real-life operational settings. SmarThor is a custom cloud-based high-volume time series data-sharing platform developed at EnergyVille, Belgium. It offers services to monitor and control energy systems within the living lab and provides centralised storage and access to this locally collected data. Additionally, data sets on local energy markets, power grids, and weather conditions are hosted, providing supplementary information on the operational context of the living lab. Currently, the platform contains more than 2500 time series, often spanning multiple years, resulting in over 2 billion data points. The availability of this wide data set via a single platform substantially expedites data analytics and artificial intelligence solutions within the Open Thor Living Lab. This paper presents the needs and requirements for the platform, its architecture and implementation, a selection of use cases, and valuable lessons learnt from developing and hosting the data-sharing platform.