Digital activation readiness for building thermal mass: a scoping review and danish living-lab infrastructure case

Thermally activated building systems can provide structural thermal storage, yet their deployment as flexibility resources depends on more than thermodynamic potential and advanced control. This study examines that deployment gap as a digital activation readiness problem. A PRISMA-ScR-informed scoping review of 123 included evidence sources maps five engineering domains: control intelligence, digitalization, system integration, flexibility performance, and comfort management. Because outcome definitions and evaluation settings are heterogeneous, the synthesis is function-oriented and descriptive rather than prevalence-based, and it does not pool effect sizes. The review indicates that control and flexibility quantification are comparatively mature, whereas interoperable sensing, commissioning, spatial data coherence, governance, and market verification are less consistently documented. These findings inform a five-layer Digital Activation Readiness Framework (DARF). The framework is applied to documented infrastructure at the University of Southern Denmark Smart Campus, including IoT gateways, QR-based commissioning, metadata- and geometry-based spatial representations, and privacy-aware geofencing. The case supports an assessment of enabling infrastructure but does not report an executed flexibility event, baseline-relative load shift, rebound, comfort verification, or market settlement. DARF therefore functions here as a conceptual and preliminary assessment structure rather than a validated performance scale. The study contributes an evidence-bounded taxonomy, clarifies the distinction between infrastructure readiness and delivered flexibility, and identifies the measurements required for future multi-site validation.