Cloud-Powered Earth Observation Tools for Urban Resilience: The BUILDSPACE Project

The BUILDSPACE project harnesses the transformative potential of cloud computing to evolve urban development and resilience practices. By integrating advanced Earth Observation (EO) data with state-of-the-art satellite and cloud technologies, BUILDSPACE addresses critical urban challenges, including climate adaptation, energy efficiency, and disaster resilience, while contributing to the European Green Deal’s objectives of sustainability and carbon neutrality. 

Central to BUILDSPACE are five innovative services designed to support urban decision-making. At the building scale, the project facilitates the generation and visualization of detailed digital twins through interactive displays, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) interfaces. These digital twins enable precise simulations for energy optimization, operational efficiency, and climate impact assessment. At the city scale, BUILDSPACE provides tools to address climate scenarios, such as urban heat islands and flooding, empowering municipalities and urban planners with actionable insights through interactive, map-based platforms. 

The project’s technical foundation lies in a robust, cloud-native architecture built on Kubernetes and OpenStack, combined with a DevOps methodology to streamline both infrastructure services and application deployment. Kubernetes orchestrates containerised workloads, enabling efficient automated deployment, scaling and management of applications, while OpenStack provides a flexible infrastructure for managing compute, storage, and networking resources. Through the DevOps approach, we ensure continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), fostering rapid development cycles and operational agility. By adopting open-source cloud platforms, the project ensures interoperability, reproducibility and automation across diverse environments, driving consistency and efficiency throughout the lifecycle of both infrastructure and applications. 

The project’s services are being validated across four European cities representing diverse climatic conditions, namely Warsaw, Riga, Piraeus and Ljubljana. These validations focus on two scenarios: construction companies monitoring building processes with advanced digital tools, and municipalities analysing the impacts of climate change on urban infrastructure. 

By advancing from TRL 5-6 to TRL 7-8, BUILDSPACE aims to deliver market-ready solutions that align with the European GNSS and Copernicus initiatives and to synchronise with the advances, concerning Digital Twin technologies and data federation mechanisms, of the Destination Earth initiative, while paving the way for a broader adoption of cloud technologies in EO-based urban resilience applications.