Intelligent Energy Europe expects district heating to double its share of the European heat market by 2020 while district cooling will grow to 25%. While this expansion will translate into 2.6% reduction in the European primary energy need and 9.3% of all carbon emissions, it will not be achieved through modernization and expansion alone but requires fundamental technological innovation to make the next generation of district heating and cooling (DHC) systems highly efficient and cost effective to design, operate and maintain. E2District aims to develop, deploy, and demonstrate a novel cloud enabled management framework for DHC systems, which will deliver compound energy cost savings of 30% through development of a District Simulation Platform to optimise DHC asset configuration targeting >5% energy reduction, development of intelligent adaptive DHC control and optimisation methods targeting an energy cost reduction between 10 and 20%, including flexible production, storage and demand assets, and system-level fault detection and diagnostics, development of behaviour analytics and prosumer engagement tools to keep the end user in the loop, targeting overall energy savings of 5%. Development of a flexible District Operation System for the efficient, replicable and scalable deployment of DHC monitoring, intelligent control, FDD and prosumer engagement, development of novel business models for DHC Operators, Integrators and Designers, validation, evaluation, and demonstration of the E2District platform, and development of strong and rigorous dissemination, exploitation and path-to-market strategies to ensure project outcomes are communicated to all DHC stakeholders. E2District addresses specifically the call’s objective related to the development of optimisation, control, metering, planning and modelling tools including consumer engagement and behaviour analytics and supports the integration of multiple generation sources, including renewable energy and storage.