Tartu Smart City Portal

Main sector: ICT urban platform (IT and technical interfaces)

Overview:

Tartus’ long term vision is to build a Digital Ecosystem for city data and services by integrating various data inputs and sensor systems together into one city ICT platform, where anyone could build their own value adding services on top of the city provided platform.

Tartu has a long tradition of using ICT solutions to improve its citizens’ quality of life. Launching a city-wide platform will:

• enhance automation and thus also increase optimization;
• gather all city-wide data relevant into one innovative portal;
• enable to freely monitor all the data both on a city, building and apartment level;
• enable to monitor the functioning of systems and prevent and detect errors;
• increase residents’ awareness of their energy consumption and thus allow the residents to make better-informed consumption decisions;
• increase both the residents’ and Tartu citizens’ awareness of the potential of ICT solutions and how they can benefit their everyday life (i.e. the smart home systems that were installed in the pilot area smartovkas).

To this end, the CIOP platform that has been deployed in Tartu includes the integration of several city-wide smart solutions: district heating, smart city lighting, smart buildings and apartments, traffic and public transport, energy consumption in public buildings, mobility, environment.

The CIOP was designed with multiple separate modules:

1. IoT platform Cumulocity for easy integration of any sensor systems,
2. Data Access Layer (DAL) for Authentication and Consent Management. This layer also introduces an API for Third Party Access to the data,
3. Data Mapping Tool as a technical service for describing and allocating data for end-users,
4. City Portal for end-user access to City and personal data.

 Without high-quality data, it is very difficult to make sustainable decisions in city management. It is becoming increasingly clear that decision-making processes must be data-driven. To ensure this, it was necessary to set up appropriate ICT infrastructure in cities, which enables data to be collected, processed, presented, and made available to all parties.

Citizen engagement:

The portal is a tool for citizens as well to monitor the energy consumption of their dwellings and public buildings. The portal will help citizens to get a quick overview of what is happening in the city, e.g. to monitor the real-time movement of public transport or the occurrence of traffic jams.

In the future, the platform will provide free open access data to allow for third parties to use it in building new services and products.

As part of additional developments, in the future, the portal can also be used to connect directly with the citizens in conducting surveys and polls, etc.

Process:

Benefits:

• enhanced automation and thus increased optimization;
• all city-wide data is available in one innovative platform;
• enable to freely monitor all the data both on a city, building and apartment level;
• enable to monitor the functioning of systems and prevent and detect errors;
• increased residents’ awareness of their energy consumption and thus the residents can make better-informed consumption decisions;
• increased awareness of the potential of ICT solutions and how they can benefit their everyday life (i.e. the smart home systems that were installed in the pilot area smartovkas).

Stakeholders:

Investment/Finance:

ca. 400,000 €

Potential for replication:

The same platform has been launched in two lighthouse cities, Tartu and Sonderborg, proving its replicability potential. Telia as a service provider has built similar solutions before for both private companies and public sector actors, which makes the solution flexible and adaptable for different parties.

Lessons Learned:

• Be careful with detailed long term plans , the situation for example on the market) surely changes.
  Flexibility is highly needed , be ready for it.
• Do not stick to initially proposed activities, if the situation changes and the activities lose their importance or the putting into practice becomes a real headache and the outcome suffers because of it.
• Choice and sustainability of partners , specially SMEs. Be aware of risks.
• Early stage engagement is highly important and paves the way to success.
• Involve decision makers from the beginning to keep the project smoothly running.
• If you implement innovative solutions which are not common on the market, then you need to devote resources and control the process as much as possible for example technical designing of retrofitting , installation of smart home system hand in hand with construction works etc.