Use Cases for European Cities in Smart Urbana project

EXPERIMENTAL USE CASES

Being the innovative experimental project within the H2020 CPS Engineering Labs project, the Smart Urbana Use Cases address the challenges of improvement of already existing business opportunities and the issues of Smart City paradigm. By using Smart CIty Monitor IoT technogy platform and breaking the isolation of services to citizens, integrating of existing facilities, legacy systems and heterogeneous platforms, the use cases demonstrated a reliable, comprehensive collection and presentation of evidence data about urban processes related to diversified infrastructure. The use cases directly contributed to the Smart Anything Everywhere initiative (SAE) by the European Commission providing a holistic, dynamic, transversal view of the city with an efficient decision-making and comprehensive analytics and constant learning system supporting sustainable developments and continuing auditing of compliance with major intenational standards like ISO 37120.

The use cases provide a practical contribution to H2020 Work Programme and several relevant projects and EC initiatives such as the European Innovation Partnership for Sustainable Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC). For example, in relation to H2020 projects CPSoS and Road2CPS, it addresses the issue of CPS’s challenge promoting a new paradigm of Smart Cities where the solution is not only technology and its interoperability, but also interaction with non-technology elements. Combining these elements will eventually create a city that is truly smart and capable of increasing the quality of life of its citizens. 

After the end of the project, its results became an essential part of the new digital transformation agenda in the cities assisting stakeholders in smart sustainable processes, continuously improved quality of life, generation of employment and new business opportunities.

 

Smart Urbana Use Case 1:  “New CPS based instruments for Smart Local Governance of quality of life in European Cities in compliance with international standards”  

In each in each project city, the urban CPS based engine is implemented running Smart City Monitor (technogy platform developed by Austrian company GOLEM.AT ) instance linked to Sofia2 middleware and enabling a transformation of data sets required for ISO 37120 compliance into valuable interactive real-time information about city sustainability status. The web information services support easy monitoring and rich yet simple analysis of quality of life and sustainability and transparency of urban processes in the city by using common mobile devices.

The use case is directly linked to the international standardization processes taking place in EU in relation to Smart Cities and specifically to ISO 37120:2014 that provided clear definition of the urban CPS model structure, KPIs and data sources required for evaluation of the quality of life in urban communities. The relevant CPS model developed accordingly to the ISO 37120 standard allows easily customising to add necessary data streams from new sensors, IoT and other sources, e.g. water management SCADA, waste, energy grids, transportation, buildings, businesses, etc provided that such linking is available and authorized by the data source owners. The compliance to international standard fosters interoperability and standardised benchmarking of quality of life in Europe.

 

Use Case 2: " “Management of Quality of Environment and Air with Smart City Monitor” 

In the cities, Alba Iulia and Faro the set of existing sensors measuring air quality was linked to Sofia2 for data collection and the results were processed in real time by Smart City Monitor instance for these cities running in the cloud. The integrated results by all indicators and each of them separately can be monitored and analysed in real time by each city municipality and if necessary by citizens. The relevant statistics and analytics can be used for preparing decisions regarding improvements measures if necessary.   

The important vital component of the quality of life for citizens is urban environment including air quality as a societal issue. In many cities, it requires continuous monitoring and control in real-time by using multiple stationary and mobile sensors and measurement systems well distributed over the urban area and communicating its data for central hub processing in real time. While the isolated purely technical solutions are available in many cities, the integrated automatic cost-effective monitoring producing comprehensive public information as continuous easily accessible service to all citizens is still rare. Use case 2 directly addresses these issues by experimenting with linking of different environmental sensors and providing citizens with real-time information services regarding holistic air quality status in real time.

Use Case 3: “Management of solid waste linked to a city status”

Realised for the Municipality of Volvi, Greece for multiple settlements

  • Waste is collected by several trucks owned by municipality waste company
  • The weight of collected waste is registered by each truck and day of collection
  • The results are recorded in MS Excel spreadsheets and used for reporting

 

Results

  • Automation of data collection from multiple spreadsheets in different locations
  • Employees prepare data in common tables
  • Results are saved in shared directories like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc
  • Data is imported from any number of spreadsheets daily automatically
  • A vast amount of non-productive work in municipalities is saved
  • Municipality employees are available for more productive work
  • Minimizes errors and maximizes trust
  • Transparency or results for all stakeholders

 

Ongoing waste processes are transparent and promptly available online for

  • Administration
  • Operators
  • Finance and accounting
  • Drivers
  • Citizens

 

“This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 644400”.