Project financed by the German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer ProtectionUsing AI to improve heating checks – Empowerment through a smart evaluation of the heating bill

The joint project aimed to develop a prototype application that will potentially help around 16 million households to better understand their heating bill and act in accordance with the assessments. In their current form, heating bills are often not prepared in an understandable way, as each metering service provider uses different formats and terminology. As a result, errors are not detected, energy and services are purchased overpriced, and incentives to save energy are not provided. This costs consumers billions of euros annually and causes unnecessary tons of CO₂.

Therefore, this project aimed at transforming the classical heating bill into understandable and transparent, comprehensible statements and evaluations by using AI with the help of a prototypical application. The project was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection (BMJV) and carried out together with the partners co2online, the University of Leipzig and SEnerCon.

In this project, ConPolicy ensured in particular the user orientation of the AI application. ConPolicy was responsible for the following work packages and steps within the joint project:

• One work package was concerned with ensuring the user-centeredness, comprehensibility and application orientation as well as the low-threshold access of the prototype application. For this purpose ConPolicy created a concept for user integration, evaluated the relevant literature, set up a consumer panel, collected customer journeys and user expectations, developed and tested concepts for user interaction, evaluated the respective effects on consumer behaviour and derived conclusions for further development.
• In a further work package, ConPolicy was involved in the development of suggestions for action for users and other services. 
• ConPolicy was also involved in the development of a concept for data protection, data security and data sovereignty for the application. For this purpose, a consumer survey was conducted to collect user concerns and wishes regarding data protection.
• Finally, ConPolicy was involved in the development of a concept for a credible and promising concept for realization.

The final report on the research project was prepared at the end of the project. The short version can be downloaded here, the print version of the long report dated 01.02.2022 is available here.