Independent measurement & verification · European partnership edition
Did the intervention actually cool the building — and by how much?
ACTRI is the independent measurement and verification institute for urban heat mitigation. We answer that one question with field evidence rather than product literature.
Science for a Liveable Future · Operated by Airple Inc., Republic of Korea
01 · The verification gap
Capital is moving into urban cooling faster than the evidence base that is supposed to justify it.
Across Europe, cool roofs, reflective coatings, cool pavements, shading structures and green infrastructure are being specified at portfolio and municipal scale. The market has matured on the supply side. The evidence side has not — performance claims are, in the great majority of cases, produced by the party that supplied or installed the intervention. As disclosure obligations tighten, that arrangement stops being acceptable.
Why laboratory certification is not enough
Existing product certification measures the solar reflectance and thermal emittance of a material, under controlled laboratory conditions, when new. It says nothing about:
Ageing
How the coating performs after one, three or five summers of soiling and weathering.
Propagation
How much of the surface-level effect actually reaches interior air temperature — which is what occupants and cooling loads respond to.
Context
How the effect behaves under the specific roof build-up, insulation state, orientation and microclimate of the actual building.
Attribution
Whether the observed change is attributable to the intervention at all — rather than simply to a cooler season.
The distance between a lab-rated material and a delivered thermal outcome is exactly where ACTRI works.
The regulatory direction of travel
Several European frameworks are converging on the same requirement.
Documented, methodologically traceable evidence of a claimed climate benefit, produced by someone with no commercial interest in the result. Our methodology is designed to sit inside this landscape.
| Framework | What it requires |
|---|---|
| CSRD / ESRS E1 | Climate adaptation actions and their effects must be reported with a substantiated, auditable basis. |
| EU Taxonomy | Adaptation-aligned activities require demonstration that the solution reduces the identified physical climate risk. |
| EPBD (recast) | Increasing attention to summer overheating and indoor thermal comfort in the existing building stock. |
| Public procurement | Municipal heat programmes increasingly require post-installation performance evidence. |
02 · Position
The referee, not the player.
A contractor cannot credibly measure the benefit of its own work. That sentence is the entire basis of this institute.
When the installer measures its own effect, nobody believes the number. We are not a player on the field. We are the referee. Tae Kyung (James) Kwon, Ph.D. — Director, ACTRI
ACTRI was established as the research and verification arm of Airple Inc., a company with fourteen consecutive profitable years in AIoT environmental monitoring. That operating history gives us something most verification bodies lack — we build and run the sensing infrastructure ourselves, so we are not dependent on the data a client chooses to hand us. At the same time, the verification function is deliberately separated from any installation or coating supply activity, so the judgement remains defensible.
Conservativeness
Where uncertainty exists, the reported benefit is always the lower bound. We would rather understate a real effect than overstate a doubtful one.
Transparency
The method is published. What we do is fully disclosed; data provenance is traceable from raw sensor record to reported figure.
Independence
Verification fees are not contingent on the result. No verification is issued for a project in which Airple holds an installation interest.
Reproducibility
The same dataset processed by the same protocol must yield the same conclusion, by any competent third party.
Why this matters commercially
For a manufacturer or ESCO, an independent verification is not a cost item. It is the document that converts a performance claim into a bankable, disclosable and tender-eligible asset — and a competitive separation from suppliers who can only offer a datasheet.
03 · Structure
One research brand. One legal operator. Five programmes.
ACTRI is the external research and verification identity. Airple Inc. (㈜에어플) is the legal entity holding contracting, operations and intellectual property.
ACTRI Research
Peer-reviewed research, field instrumentation studies, and public and industry-funded projects.
ACTRI Standards
Protocol development and evaluation frameworks, aligned to international normative references.
ACTRI Certification
Training certificates and, through the protocol, project-level verification statements.
ACTRI Academy
Technical training and seminars for practitioners in thermal performance and water ingress diagnostics.
ACTRI Water Diagnostics Centre
Leak detection, moisture diagnostics and building envelope failure analysis.
Heat and water are one problem
Both are governed by the building envelope. A roof that has lost its waterproofing integrity cannot hold a cool-roof claim, because moisture in the build-up changes its thermal behaviour. Our roof verification therefore begins with an envelope integrity assessment.
04 · The Airple Heat M&V Protocol
A documented method for quantifying the delivered effect of passive and low-carbon heat mitigation.
Scope. Cool roofs and reflective coatings, cool pavements, shading structures, green roofs and façades, hybrid cool-green systems, and evaporative measures. Verified quantities include surface temperature reduction, interior surface and air temperature response, weather-normalised cooling energy savings, avoided emissions and operating cost effect.
Normative references
| IPMVP (EVO 10000-1) | Measurement and verification framework; option selection, baseline definition, adjustment for independent variables. |
| ISO 14064-2 / -3 | Quantification and validation of project-level greenhouse gas reductions; conservativeness and materiality. |
| ISO 50015 | Measurement and verification of organisational energy performance. |
| WMO Guide No. 8 | Meteorological instrumentation and observation practice for the reference weather record. |
Method in outline
Envelope screening
Moisture and integrity assessment of the substrate before any thermal baseline is established. A wet build-up invalidates the measurement.
Treatment–control pairing
An untreated control surface is selected against defined similarity criteria — orientation, construction, solar exposure, proximity to heat sources. The paired design is what allows the effect to be attributed rather than merely observed.
Instrumentation
Roof surface, interior surface, interior air, ambient air, relative humidity and global solar irradiance, at specified placement, shielding and minimum sensor count.
Baseline and reporting periods
Continuous logging across a defined pre-intervention baseline and a reporting period covering at least one full cooling season.
Weather-normalised analysis
The Airple Analytics Engine derives the daytime and peak differentials, normalises for irradiance and ambient conditions, and applies statistical testing to the paired series.
Verification report
A signed report stating method, data completeness, uncertainty, conformance level and the conservatively stated result.
05 · Conformance levels
We grade the strength of the evidence rather than pretending it is uniform.
Not every project can support the same evidentiary standard. The protocol says so explicitly.
Paired treatment and control · full baseline and reporting period · statistical significance testing · uncertainty quantified.
For disclosure, procurement evidence and financed performance guarantees.
Before-and-after comparison with weather normalisation, where no valid control surface is available.
For portfolio reporting and internal performance management.
Short-duration indicative assessment against protocol instrumentation requirements.
For pilot entry, feasibility and site selection.
What the client receives
- Verification ReportMethod statement, instrumentation record, data completeness log, analysis, uncertainty statement, conclusion and conformance level.
- Data packageThe underlying time-series in open format, so the client's own auditor can reproduce the result.
- Verification markA project-referenced mark with a stated validity period, usable in the client's own marketing and tender documentation.
- Re-verification scheduleBecause reflective performance degrades, claims carry an expiry and a defined re-measurement interval.
A note on what we will not do
We do not issue a verification where the data does not support one. A completed measurement campaign that returns a null or negative result is delivered as such, at the agreed fee. The value of the mark depends entirely on that being true.
06 · Evidence base
Controlled field trials — the protocol was refined against its own results.
A parallel field trial instrumented four roof surfaces under identical climatic exposure, logging roof surface temperature, interior surface temperature, interior air temperature and global solar irradiance continuously across a full cooling season.
| Surface | Condition | Role in the design |
|---|---|---|
| A | Reflective coating, one year aged | Degradation of delivered performance over time |
| B | Reflective coating, newly applied, white | Upper-bound reference case |
| C | Reflective coating, newly applied, grey | Colour and albedo sensitivity |
| D | Untreated | Control |
6.4 °C at the strongest measured differential
Daytime roof surface temperature reduction against the untreated control.
Colour specification governs the outcome
The newly applied white surface produced the strongest interior cooling response; the grey surface the weakest — confirming that colour specification, not merely the presence of a "cool" product, determines what is delivered.
Ageing is measurable, and material
The one-year-aged surface performed measurably below the newly applied equivalent, quantifying degradation that vendor datasheets do not capture. This single finding is the commercial argument for periodic re-verification.
The effect propagates inward
The surface-level effect reached interior surface and interior air temperature at an attenuated but statistically detectable magnitude.
Reference pilot
| Document reference | AMV-2026-001 — Measurement & Verification Plan |
| Site | Spain Building rooftop, Suwon, Republic of Korea |
| Configuration | Owner-operated building, enabling unrestricted instrumentation and full-season baseline capture without tenant disruption constraints. |
| Purpose | Reference implementation of the protocol end to end, used as the demonstration case for partner engagement. |
07 · Capability
The measurement stack, end to end.
We design the sensors, run the loggers, hold the archive and wrote the protocol. That vertical integration is the reason the numbers are defensible.
Sensing
Purpose-built AIoT environmental nodes — surface and air temperature, relative humidity, solar irradiance, particulate matter, moisture. Designed and manufactured in house, which removes the dependency on client-supplied data.
Data
Continuous long-duration logging with completeness auditing. A cumulative environmental observation archive measured in tens of terabytes across more than 1,200 monitoring days.
Analytics
Weather normalisation, paired-series statistical testing, attribution and uncertainty estimation. The engine executes the published protocol; the coefficients and model internals remain proprietary.
Reporting
Structured verification reports and reproducible data packages, issued under ACTRI reference numbering.
Tae Kyung (James) Kwon, Ph.D.
Founder and Chief Executive, Airple Inc.; Director, ACTRI. Ph.D., Seoul National University (smart city and environmental design). Approximately thirty years in the global semiconductor and embedded systems industry across six countries — including Samsung, LSI Logic, STMicroelectronics and MediaTek — prior to founding Airple. That background is the reason ACTRI treats verification as a systems and instrumentation problem rather than a consulting exercise.
Published, reviewed, partnered
A peer-reviewed publication record in international journals covering urban climate, building performance and environmental monitoring. Active peer reviewer for multiple international journals in the built environment and urban sustainability field. Research partnership with Seoul National University, where the institute's director holds a concurrent research fellowship at the Graduate School of Data Science. Participation in public-sector demonstration programmes including ecological restoration monitoring and urban park environmental health assessment.
Our disclosure principle
What the protocol does is fully published, so that any competent party can audit the logic. How the engine implements it remains proprietary. Transparency of method and protection of implementation are not in conflict.
08 · Partnership
Four engagement models, in ascending order of commitment.
Independent project verification
Project-by-project measurement and verification of a completed or planned heat mitigation intervention, delivered as a Verification Report at the applicable conformance level. Suitable for a first engagement with no structural commitment.
Protocol licensing & analytics access
The partner performs the instrumentation and field measurement; verification is issued only once the dataset has passed the ACTRI analytics engine. Scales across a portfolio without scaling our field presence.
Joint demonstration pilot
A co-funded instrumented pilot on the partner's own building or municipal asset, over one cooling season, producing a jointly authored technical case study usable by both parties.
Research consortium participation
ACTRI joins as the measurement and verification work package holder in publicly funded consortia — the role most collaborative proposals leave underspecified, and the one that reviewers scrutinise hardest.
Who we are looking to work with
| Coating & roofing manufacturers | Independent substantiation of field performance and ageing behaviour, differentiating from datasheet-only competitors. |
| ESCOs & energy performance contractors | Third-party verified savings for guaranteed performance contracts. |
| Municipalities & public asset owners | Post-installation evidence for heat action plans and accountable use of adaptation budgets. |
| Building portfolio owners & REITs | Substantiated adaptation evidence for sustainability disclosure. |
| Engineering consultancies | A measurement partner for thermal comfort and overheating assessment mandates. |
| Certification & inspection bodies | Methodology and instrumentation partnership for an outcome-level scheme. |
09 · Governance
Independence, stated in writing and structured into the operation.
Legal and contractual basis
ACTRI operates as the research and verification institute of Airple Inc., a Korean corporation. All contracts, liabilities and intellectual property sit with Airple Inc.; ACTRI is the research identity under which the work is published and issued. Partners contract with the legal entity and receive deliverables under the institute's name. This is stated explicitly in every engagement so that the relationship is never ambiguous.
Independence safeguards
Verification fees are fixed and not contingent on the direction or magnitude of the result. No verification is issued for any project in which the operator holds a coating supply or installation interest — such engagements are declined or referred. Field service delivery and verification are separated in both naming and reporting line, so the diagnostic function is not a sales channel for the remedial function. Null and negative results are reported and invoiced identically to positive results.
Data handling
Measurement campaigns generate building-level environmental data. Our default position is that this data belongs to the client. ACTRI retains the right to use anonymised, site-de-identified records for methodological research and publication, subject to written agreement. Deployments involving personal data are structured to align with the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation, and data residency arrangements for European engagements are agreed project by project.
Intellectual property
The protocol document is published and freely readable. The analytics implementation, sensing hardware designs and the verification mark are proprietary to Airple Inc. and protected by registered rights. Client-specific data and findings remain the client's, subject to the research use provision above.
Standing statement of limitations
ACTRI is a private research institute. It is not a notified body, an accredited inspection body under ISO/IEC 17020, or an accredited certification body under ISO/IEC 17065, and its verification statements do not constitute regulatory conformity assessment. Our methodology is aligned to the normative references listed on this site; alignment is stated as such and is not represented as accreditation. Reports are independent technical evidence intended to support, not replace, our clients' own compliance obligations. Accreditation of the scheme is a stated medium-term objective and prospective partners are invited to discuss participation in it.
10 · Engagement pathway
From first conversation to a verified result in one cooling season.
Screening and scoping
Site assessment against protocol eligibility, control-surface availability, envelope integrity check, and definition of the achievable conformance level. Concludes with a fixed scope and fee proposal.
Instrumented verification
Installation, baseline capture, continuous monitoring through the reporting period, analysis, and issue of the Verification Report and mark.
Portfolio rollout
Protocol licensing across the partner's portfolio, re-verification scheduling, and where appropriate joint publication or a co-developed certification programme.
Begin with a single building.
The most useful first step is one instrumented roof. It costs little, takes one season, and produces a document that either supports the claim or does not. Either outcome is worth more than another datasheet.
- Institute
- ACTRI — Airple Climate Technology Research Institute
- Operator
- Airple Inc. (㈜에어플)
- Base
- Dongtan, Hwaseong, Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea
- Academic partner
- Seoul National University, Graduate School of Data Science
- Director
- Tae Kyung (James) Kwon, Ph.D.
- jim@airple.net
- Domains
- Urban heat mitigation · building thermal performance · water ingress diagnostics · AIoT environmental monitoring
- Enquiries
- English and Korean correspondence both welcome