City of Things initiative is an open innovation environment where different actors are gathered within a unique innovation infrastructure and research service in which new technologies (with a focus on Internet Of Things) are being explored, shaped and tested in a citywide living lab setting. Hundreds of smart sensors and wireless gateways positioned at carefully selected locations across streets and buildings will transform the city of Antwerp into a true living lab for the IoT.
Innovation Summary
Innovation Overview
The long-term objective is to connect thousands of Antwerp citizens with numerous innovative solutions that will considerably improve their quality of life, e.g. by positively impacting mobility and public safety in the city or by mitigating the influence of air pollution. Instead of a lab environment, where innovative software and hardware solutions are tested in an artificial context, the entire city is transformed into a real-life test bed where real-time data are collected and analysed on a large scale.
Innovation Description
What Makes Your Project Innovative?
The development of smart-city services comes with a number of challenges: there is little knowhow, it requires a significant investment as well as the engagement from different stakeholders.Too often the development of new services is taking place in a vacuum, with no interaction with the envisaged end-users.This can result in a mismatch between the solution and the value it is expected to generate, often resulting in a failed innovation.
Secondly, smart city services are more and more integrated services that consist of a broad set of components.To start developing such service one needs to interact with various actors in the ecosystem.
Finally, to test and evaluate smart city services and to assess their real value and impact, it needs to be deployed within a city context. Not only for developers, but also for cities there is still a long learning curve on how to deal with these new services and the changing business models, what role a city can or need to play.
Innovation Development
Collaborations & Partnerships
Between imec, as leading partner of City of Things, and the city of Antwerp, a collaboration agreement has been signed in which various dimension of cooperation are being tackled. Due to this agreement City of Things is able
to deploy its infrastructure on a city level, interacting with different city infrastructures (also on data level). For the specific R&D projects that are being deployed in the living lab, an innovation collaboration agreement is foreseen.
Users, Stakeholders & Beneficiaries
Academia, Businesses, Civil Society, General population, Government bodies, Government staff
Innovation Reflections
Results, Outcomes & Impacts
City Of Things has only just been launched. On the technological level the following elements have already been achieved: The rollout of various gateways throughout the city providing connectivity supporting different network protocols: LoRa, SigFox, DASH7, Wifi, Bluetooth.
A data layer infrastructure to gather, harmonize, store, analyseand visualize different datastreams. This includes an APIbased structure that enables an open data structure for sharing datastreams Additionally a full set of enabling tools for prototyping have been put into place, including methods to enable ideation and experimentation, measure the user experience and to conduct behavioural change experiments.
This already resulted into different small scale pilots. One in which a set of sensors to measure the air quality is being attached to postal office vehicles. These data enable the city to take proper measurements, adjust current policies and to assess the effects of these actions in real-time.
Conditions for Success
Involve all actors within the quadruple helix from the beginning in order to capture their needs and demands. A strong partnership and engagement of the local government is a necessity to be able to deploy a city-based real life test environment.
Instead of deploying a fixed operational infrastructure (network, data, user) at the beginning, this has to grow together with the different projects that will take place in the living lab. This will provide you withmore flexibility and can anticipate to different demands and needs.
Smart city solutions should not feel strange to citizens. Therefore sufficient (proactive) attention needs to be given to the perception of the solutions, especially on the matters of transparency and ownership.
City of Things is coordinated by a research institute, offering theadvantage that it can act as a neutral player without a direct commercial interest and that the setup is strongly inspired by a broad range various research questions.
Lessons Learned
The success of the City of Things as a real life testbed and living lab environment for smart city services depends on: The strong belief in the opportunities that such living lab has and the willingness to invest in such infrastructure (by all stakeholders). The
collaboration and close interaction with all stakeholders: companies, citizens, government and academia. The operational model of the living lab should be based on a long-term basis and not project-based. The initial startup phase of about one year has allowed not to jumpstart things, to work on a solid (organizational and technological) base and to have an intensive dialogue with the various stakeholders.
The second year of City of Things will be used to gradually deploy various pilots and experiments and fine tune the organization, the infrastructure and the offering. An
interdisciplinary team that can operate from a central base.
Status:
- Implementation - making the innovation happen
Innovation provided by:
Date Published:
7 August 2016