ERCIM News 127
October 2021
Special theme Smart and Circular Cities
Guest editors Erwin Schoitsch (AIT) and Georgios Mylonas (ISI, Athena Research and Innovation Center)
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by Erwin Schoitsch (AIT) and Georgios Mylonas (ISI, Athena Research and Innovation Center)
Smart city technologies have been proliferating at a rapid pace for some years now, and at the same time, the divide between the natural and digital worlds has lessened considerably. Multiple sensing endpoints located in our environment, offices, homes, devices, and even our body, produce continuous streams of sensor data. At the same time, the concept of the circular economy has entered the mainstream, and we are now seeing many communities and businesses adopt novel approaches based on circularity (e.g., in the European Green Cities Network). European policy (“Green Deal”) has reacted to the challenges of climate change and environmental footprint reduction, particularly in the context of large urban agglomeration. Smartness (intelligence) must address not only the immediate goals of human wellbeing, assisted living and comfort but, perhaps even more importantly, long-term sustainability, as defined by the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Source: un.org.
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by Michael Kreutzer and Kirstin Scheel (Fraunhofer SIT)
The topic of smartification has become ubiquitous; urban planners and public organisations are investing heavily in digitalisation projects. At the same time, cybersecurity often seems to still be a sideshow. Is there a way to get from smart cities to smart governance?
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by Philipp Lämmel, Michell Boerger, Nikolay Tcholtchev (Fraunhofer FOKUS) and Eva Ottendörfer (Fraunhofer IAO)
Urban ICT infrastructure is playing an increasingly decisive role as the technical backbone of smart cities. To guarantee the protection of the public sector and citizens in this context, the security of this infrastructure is of utmost importance and should be continuously monitored and improved. This article presents measures and recommendations towards ensuring the security of urban ICT infrastructures.
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by Anastasia Pustozerova and Rudolf Mayer (SBA Research)
Within any smart system, data is vital for making the management of resources and assets more efficient. At the same time, data is a potential vulnerability to data owners, and it could become a threat in the hands of an adversary. Data security and privacy are therefore critical for building sustainable smart systems like smart cities. In such systems, where data collection is distributed, federated learning seems like a prime candidate to address the issue of data privacy. However, there are still concerns that need to be addressed regarding privacy and security in federated learning.
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by Christoph Klikovits (Forschung Burgenland), Clemens Gnauer (Forschung Burgenland), Patrik Abraham (Fachhochschule Burgenland)
In today’s smart cities, the question remains how to securely integrate a multitude of different and constantly changing Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services. This is where we propose the combination of an identity provider (e.g.: ID-Austria [L3]) and the Arrowhead framework [L2] to verify sensors by matching them with a known legal identity. By providing an application that assures a secure authentication and trustworthy communication for people, sensors, and services in a smart city.
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by Matthias Eckhart, Andreas Ekelhart (SBA Research and University of Vienna), and Roland Eisl (ENRAG)
Since cyber-physical systems are the backbone of smart cities and innovative industrial applications, their safe and secure operation is paramount. However, due to the steadily increasing aggressiveness, sophistication, and stealth of cyberattacks, new methods for threat detection and response are needed. The concept of digital twins opens up new avenues of research to address these gaps.
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by Nikolaos Efthymiopoulos, Prodromos Makris, Emmanouel Varvarigos (National Technical University of Athens)
Circularity and sustainability in modern smart grids require open data models that can support dynamic and efficient distribution-network-aware energy management. In this context, the FLEXGRID [L1] project is developing a digital platform that will offer digital energy services (DESs) that help energy sector stakeholders (i.e., Distribution System Operators (DSOs), Transmission System Operators (TSOs), market operators, Renewable Energy Sources (RES) producers, retailers, flexibility aggregators) to: (i) automate and optimise the planning, operation and management of their systems and assets, and (ii) interact in a dynamic and efficient way with the electricity system and other stakeholders.
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by Sonam Norbu, Benoit Couraud, Merlinda Andoni, David Flynn (Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh) and Valentin Robu (CWI and TU Delft)
In many smart energy communities all over the world, consumers are joining forces to jointly invest in their own renewable energy generation (wind turbine, solar panels) and battery assets. But how can we efficiently control the community-owned infrastructure, and fairly distribute the output among consumers of different sizes and consumption profiles? Researchers at CWI Amsterdam and Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, are using techniques from distributed artificial intelligence to address this challenge.
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by Soteris Constantinou (University of Cyprus, Cyprus), Andreas Konstantinidis (Frederick University, Cyprus) and Demetrios Zeinalipour-Yazti (University of Cyprus, Cyprus)
The advancement of renewable energy infrastructure, such as photovoltaic systems, in smart buildings has highlighted the importance of energy self-consumption – i.e., the process by which IoT-enabled, energy-demanding devices intelligently consume energy at the time it is available. In contrast, user comfort levels expressed in the form of Rule Automation Workflows (RAW) are usually not aligned with renewable production patterns. We have devised an innovative framework, coined IoT Meta-Control Firewall (IMCF+), which aims to balance the trade-off between comfort, energy consumption and CO2 emissions. The IMCF+ framework incorporates an innovative Green Planner (GP) algorithm, which is an AI-inspired algorithm that schedules energy consumption with a variety of amortization strategies, implemented as part of a complete IoT ecosystem in OpenHAB.
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by Sam Gunner, Eddie Wilson and Theo Tryfonas (University of Bristol)
As part of the Horizon 2020 Lighthouse Project REPLICATE, a fleet of electric bikes (e-bikes) were fitted with novel monitoring equipment. This hardware integrates into the e-bike’s electrical system, harvesting power from the e-bike’s battery and gathering data from its internal communications bus. Data has already been gathered from 3,000 journeys, covering more than 7,000 km, recording user behaviour for every single pedal stroke. This data creates a powerful detailed insight into the use of e-bikes in relation to variables such as topology, weather and remaining power – one pedal stroke at a time.
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by Dimitrios Amaxilatis (SparkWorks Ltd.), Ioannis Chatzigiannakis (Sapienza University of Rome) and Simos Papadogeorgos (Power Made SA)
Water metering, a major challenge for most cities around the world, is achieved by collecting data from many thousands of water meters using either on-site visits or manual drive-by methods. The main obstacles to the digitisation of this process are the number of water meters and their operational lifetime requirements, making the use of technologies like 4/5G-based connectivity highly inefficient and inappropriate. Our work benefits from a hierarchical architecture setup using multiple layers and edge computing to increase the data collection rates, prolong the lifetime of the whole infrastructure, minimise the additional cost while increasing the benefits, and enabling the data-driven extraction of useful conclusions like consumption profiling or incident detection.
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by Thanasis Gentimis, Theodore Chatzidimitriou and Antonis Kokossis (SymbioLabs)
A reward scheme operated through a digital platform is encouraging consumers to recycle used cooking oil in West Macedonia, Greece. Cooking oil bottles have personalised barcodes, which, upon return of the bottles, enable the user to collect points that can be redeemed on benefits and discounts in local businesses.
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by Martin Litzenberger, Carmina Coronel and Christoph Wiesmeyr (AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH)
Real-time traffic situation monitoring is key to optimising traffic flow using intelligent traffic systems (ITS), especially in the urban environment. Often, the high density of traffic sensors needed to achieve a seamless real-time monitoring of important arterial roads is difficult to implement due to technical constraints or installation costs. Fibre optic acoustic sensing (FOAS) is a relatively new technology that allows a seamless, real-time monitoring of road traffic over distances of up to 50 km, using the existing telecom fibre-optic cable infrastructure.
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by Susie Ruston McAleer, Mark McAleer and Pavel, Kogut (21c Consultancy Ltd)
Visualise a world in which people can rapidly and intelligently collaborate and respond to societal challenges and unlock innovation for future service needs as easily as visiting Google Maps. A world where the urban experience becomes easily understandable at the touch of a button, breaking down service silos and enabling evidence-based decisions and behaviour changes to be made collaboratively and effectively. This vision is fast becoming a reality thanks to an emerging local digital twin market, with European innovative initiatives such as Digital Urban European Twins (DUET) [L1] and COMPAIR [L2] leading the way.
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by Simos Malamis, Stavroula Kappa, Eleni Nyktari and Constantinos Noutsopoulos (National Technical University of Athens)
The work of the HYDROUSA project is revolutionising the water value chains in the Mediterranean region. We use innovative nature-based solutions to utilise disregarded forms of water to combat water scarcity and to support tourism and agricultural activities.
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by Daniel Bruno, Miguel Sevilla-Callejo, Enrique Navarro and Francisco Sanz
Did you know that we could use plants as sensors to monitor the air quality and pollution in our cities? The Ibercivis Foundation together with the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology has developed the “Vigilantes del Aire” project to measure air quality in Spain. Using citizen science, samples from 205 municipalities in 26 Spanish provinces were successfully obtained and processed.
A Holistic and Scalable Solution for Research, Innovation and Education During the Energy Transition
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by Helen C. Leligou (University of West Attica)
The energy transition challenges the education and training of students, technical /energy professionals, service designers and marketers, and citizens throughout the EU. The project ASSET has developed a set of tools that address this challenge and are evaluated by end users.
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by Petros Ganos, Athanasios Kalogeras, Tanya Politi and Lena Tsipouri
Owing to limited human and financial resources, some medium-sized cities, particularly those that are less technologically advanced and with poor administration, risk falling behind their more advanced metropolitan counterparts in the transition into smart cities. A systematised approach is needed to help such cities catch up. The EU ICC initiative helped a group of leading thinkers of the city of Patras to organise a roadmap, consult, design and adopt individual projects, sowing the seeds for a later systematic digital transformation.
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by Christian Thomay and Markus Tauber (Research Studios Austria FG), Christoph Schmittner (Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH) and Beatriz Tadeo Fuica (IRCAV, Sorbonne-Nouvelle University)
Increasingly, digital cities are investing in digital tourism, which has benefited from advances in digital arts. Digitisation projects can widen both the scope and accessibility of cultural heritage content and allow for interactions in a more sustainable, environmentally respectful fashion. Recent advances in digitalisation have opened the door to a range of new research directions.
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by Sobah Abbas Petersen (SINTEF Digital) and Hanne Cecilie Geirbo (Oslo Metropolitan University)
In order to design digital technologies that solve problems in smart and sustainable ways, it is vital to consider the challenge from a bottom-up perspective. Studying waste management and circularity in confined areas, such as small islands, highlights the specific challenges presented by resource and space limitations and raises questions about the geographical scale of a circular economy or a smart and circular city.