PALAEMON proposes the development and evaluation of a sophisticated mass centralised evacuation system, based on a radical re-thinking of Mass Evacuation Vessels (MEVs) combined with an intelligent ecosystem of critical components providing real-time access to and representation of data to establish appropriate evacuation strategies for optimizing the operational planning of the evacuation process on damaged or flooded vessels. The intelligent ecosystem of PALAEMON incorporates innovative technologies for sensing, people monitoring and counting and localisation services as well as real-time data during accident time. These will be integrated into an independent, smart situation-awareness and guidance system for sustaining an active evacuation route for large crowds, making emergency response in EU passenger ships more efficient. Continuous monitoring and permanent control will enhance the capacity to detect, prevent and mitigate any issue and potential harm arising from physical and/or man-made accidents and disasters. The proposed ecosystem will include the new IMO standard for data exchange-VDES. Since maritime disasters in recent years are a stark reminder of the imperative need for timely and effective evacuation of large passenger ships during emergency the aim of this project is to maximize the effectiveness of passenger evacuation, during an emergency and/or a serious incident, from large Cruise and RoPax ships by combining the expertise of stakeholders from the field of cruise ship manufacturing, large cruise ship operators, classification societies, sensor and technology organizations, with a multidisciplinary group of innovators (incl. innovative start-ups, consolidated SMEs in the smart ICT domain, experts in the ship evacuation domain from research institutes, international networks in maritime and key industry drivers. MEVs prototypes will be validated in controlled enviroment and the smart evacuation ecosystem will be demostrated in two use cases.

The Energy Performance Contracting (EPC) model has been successful in attracting investments in energy efficiency, but mainly for single, large projects. Energy efficiency programs, on the other hand, constitute an alternative path to scaling up the number of buildings that implement energy efficiency interventions, but the practice of rebates and incentives that are paid up front creates a need to rely on deemed energy savings and on complex and costly regulations that hinder innovation. SENSEI will propose a solution to this deadlock. Building on earlier successful experimentation outside of the EU, we will design concepts and business models that will help: (a) generate new sources of benefits that increase the value of an energy retrofit project by enabling the compensation of energy efficiency as an energy resource, and (b) turn the project’s value into an investable asset to attract private financing. The main concept underlying the SENSEI business models is pay-for-performance (P4P), which offers an effective way to engage both energy providers and third-party investorsin energy efficiency. SENSEI will first elaborate P4P schemes for financing energy efficiency that can be implemented across the EU, and then integrate these P4P schemes with the preparation and implementation stages of the EPC model, with the intention of increasing and/or financing the gains in a building’s value that are produced by energy efficiency improvements. The developed concepts will utilize actual building data and the consortium’s competences to carry out a series of negotiation games among all SENSEI parties – representing all links in the EPC and P4P chain. The project has planned a series of activities to both disseminate the insights from these games and to support stakeholders in using our recommendations with the goal of rolling out the first P4P pilots in the EU.