For optimising thermal energy supply in industry, a holistic integral approach is required that includes possibilities of demand reduction by heat recovery and process integration, and by an intelligent combination of efficient heat and cold supply technologies.

EINSTEIN is a tool-kit for fast and high quality thermal energy audits in industry, composed by an audit guide describing the methodology and by a software tool that guides the auditor through all the audit steps.

The expert system software tool is available for free, as an open source software project. This type of software development has shown to be very efficient for dissemination of knowledge and for the continuous maintenance and improvement by user contributions.