Moving Towards Smarter Cities

The third edition of the European Smart & Living City conference, launched three years ago, was held at Le Royal Hotel, Luxembourg City, on 1-2 December 2015. Organized this year by Neobuild, Luxinnovation and the Council for the Economic Development of Construction (CDEC), the conference was aimed at all key members of the city: politicians, architects, town planners, sociologists, entrepreneurs, builders, building managers, energy engineers, stakeholders in the ICT sector, local government technical services, environmental consultants, mobility specialists, players in the solidarity economy and citizens. A very varied target audience for a topic touching on almost all aspects of the economy and social life: building, energy, mobility, leisure time, work, etc. There are also many challenges: financial, technological, environmental, and social.

Luxembourg has a definite role to play in the implementation of Smart Cities. Its size, its short decision-making routes, its socio-economic model, its multiculturalism, its connectivity rate, which is one of the highest in the world etc., are just some of the advantages making it an excellent testbed for numerous developed solutions. In some fields, such as Smart Finance or sustainable building, with the country's numerous award-winning projects at European level, Luxembourg is even leading the way.

During her opening address, Secretary of State for the Economy, Francine Closener, reminded the audience that in the not-too-distant future, two-thirds of the world's population will be living in cities. Luxembourg, too, will be affected by these issues in terms of environmental impact or the saturation of the road network, for example. This is the reason why the topic of Smart Cities is an integral part of numerous funding programmes. She also highlighted the place occupied by digital technologies, and more specifically the management and storage of data, in the development of Smart Cities. For more than 10 years, Luxembourg has been investing significantly in these digital infrastructures which, coupled with the cutting-edge expertise which exists in Luxembourg, will enable the country to consolidate its role as a testbed.

The specialized expertise helping to make our cities smarter is to be found in particular at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), where the Smart City is one of its main areas of focus. Its "IT for Innovative Services" (ITIS) department  is working on smart systems in complex and continuously changing environments. The fields of application are construction, healthcare and wellbeing, mobility, and IT services. The GOLIATH project can be singled out from among the most illustrative projects. Co-funded by the National Research Fund (FNR), the research team is working on the home of the future in which objects will interact with each other to ensure that comfort levels meet users' expectations. In the ZAC-eMovin and Nordstad-eMovin projects, which ended a short time ago, researchers focused on electromobility solutions for industrial parks in the former and in Nordstad for the latter. In the 7^th Framework Programme for Research European project V-Feather, ITIS worked with a consortium of eight partners on the possibility of using electric vehicles for delivering goods within the urban environment, deliveries being a major source of congestion and pollution in city centres. In the field of materials, the "Materials Research and Technology" (MRT) department deals with multifunctional materials. Consequently, in the CO-FERMAT project, co-funded by the FNR, MRT researchers are investigating coupling phenomena in multifunctional ferroic materials, which will pave the way for a whole series of new applications in the field of smart sensors. Lastly, the "Environmental Research and Innovation" (ERIN) department deals with questions related to integrated management of water resources, valorization of plant biomass for the production of biopolymers and bioenergy, and life-cycle sustainability analysis and risk assessment. An important focus of the work of the environmental research team is on the visualization of environmental data which enables stakeholders to make good decisions quickly.

During the conference, Dr Lucien Hoffmann, director of ERIN, accordingly presented the "Smart City Platform" tool which enables complex data to be modelled in order to facilitate the decision-making process. Developed in the framework of the Interreg MUSIC project whose aim was to reduce CO₂ emissions in urban areas in order to provide urban planners and local authorities access to energy mapping, CO₂ emissions and identifying opportunities for energy exchange and controlling its effects, the Smart City Platform tool has subsequently been used for other applications, such as in the Interreg LaMiLo project for goods transport in urban areas, multimodal freight transport in the West-East corridor of Europe, air quality, climate, etc. The tool is paired with a tangible interface developed by ITIS for facilitating the collaborative decision-making process and interacting with thematic maps. Other topics will shortly be integrated into the tool, including the methodology developed in the FNR DAEDALUS project enabling Life-Cycle Analysis (LCA) to be applied to the renovation sector. This will be another step towards smarter cities.

To learn more about the tool, visit the dedicated "Smart City Energy Platform" and "Smart City Logistics Platform"  websites, or contact Ulrich Leopold.