Smart Cities eager to improve city living experience and to prepare new services for citizens

On 7 June and 8 June 2023, ITEA organised its 9th international customer workshop in Antwerp and this year it focused on Smart Cities, an important challenge of ITEA. The workshop was generously hosted by Nokia in its premises in Antwerp and organised with the help of Esri Canada, Siemens and BABLE.

The event gathered around 35 representatives coming from 10 end users of Smart Cities solutions representing the point of view of the customers and 18 solutions providers - large companies, research organisations and SMEs – with expertise in the Smart Cities sector. The following organisations took part:

This event was the second Smart Cities customer workshop organised by ITEA, the first one being held in Istanbul in September 2015. We decided to address the Smart Cities challenge once more for several reasons.

First, cities are very important for more and more people. Today worldwide, we have more people living in cities than in rural areas. It is forecast that this will continue to grow with more than 68% of the worldwide population living in cities in 2050. Everyone is interested in the progress proposed by the Smart Cities. Even if we do not live in a city, we all visit and access some of them so would like to benefit from new digital solutions to improve these experiences.

Second, the city level has the most impact politically on the daily life of citizens. So, citizens are eager to be in the loop of new digital solution developments. This presents a benefit and a challenge at the same time to manage citizen engagement.

Third, it is the right time to discuss how some technological evolutions can impact cities. There are more and more available and affordable sensors delivering new types of data that can be exploited to better manage the city. Artificial Intelligence is also an impactful technology for Smart Cities. Since this technology has already been involved in city solutions for several years, we can assess the first lessons learnt from the use of AI.

Finally, the evolution of the city needs the involvement of a lot of stakeholders. To move forward some collaborations must be put in place. This collaborative environment is very similar to ITEA collaborative research projects for which is it very valuable to have a complete value chain working together.

Topics addressed

For these different reasons, it was anatural choice for ITEA to centre the annual customer workshop on Smart Cities. To set up this event, we benefited from discussions with Esri Canada and Siemens who helped us to select four topics for the workshop. This selection was made knowing that a two-day workshop would be too short to address the whole field of Smart Cities. However, the selected topics already covered a large spectrum of research challenges for which software innovation can be a game changer.

• Environmental footprint:
  How to stimulate carbon neutrality, circular economy, sustainability and adaptation to climate change?
• Mobility:
  How to allow everyone to move from one point of the city to another considering all the mobility modes including walking, bike, trolley, public transportation, motorbike, car etc.?
• City evolution planning:
  How to plan the expansion of the city or to transform it for more activities or better living experience?
• Security and crisis management:
  How to ensure that the people will be safe inside the city; how to prepare action plans in the case of a disaster like fire, pollution, utilities breakdown, attack, etc.?

It was also decided to put some emphasis during the discussions on how Digital Twins can help to tackle these challenges. Nevertheless, the term ‘Digital Twin’ is not a clearly defined ‘thing’ that everyone understands in the same way. It is still surrounded by many questions regarding different aspects, from both a technological and application perspective:

• What is the best approach to design the Digital Twins?
• How can the relevant data be collected to design and to feed the Digital Twins?
• How the Digital Twins be connected to the real systems that they represent?
• How can multiple Digital Twins be interconnected?
• How can Digital Twins be shared between different city stakeholders?

The workshop aimed to enable the different participants to exchange views on these questions and to define a shared challenge on which to collaborate and build a shared vision.