Smart Cities and standards – The approach of the Horizon2020-project ESPRESSO

A Smart City integrates physical, digital and human systems to deliver a sustainable, prosperous and inclusive future for its citizens. Many of these innovative solutions will be based on sophisticated information and communication technologies. However, technological complexity, as well as the complexity of the various sectoral services involved within a Smart City, require a system approach to standardisation. Such an approach must promote the greatest possible reuse of existing open standards to accelerate the Smart City deployment. In an effort to leverage the promise of a system approach, the Horizon 2020-project ESPRESSO (systEmic standardisation apPRoach to Empower Smart citieS and cOmmunities) will focus on the development of a conceptual Smart City Information Framework based on open standards. A further goal of ESPRESSO will be to envisage the impact of those technologies for urban planning and also in societal terms. The partner cities will be engaged to analyse how their services can be streamlined and improved through large-scale use of standards. This will be done by analysing the downstream changes from the new scenarios enabled by large-scale interoperability and what this could bring for a future Smart City. Based on a detailed requirements-engineering campaign executed in close cooperation with cities, standardisation organizations, administrative bodies, and private industry, the project will identify open standards matching the elicited requirements and will establish a baseline for interoperability between the various sectoral data sources and the Smart City enterprise application platform. In a comprehensive set of coordination, support and networking activities, the project will engage a very large number of stakeholders, such as Smart Cities (both existing and those with aspirations), European Standardisation Organizations (ESOs), National Standardisation Bodies (NSBs), Standards Development Organizations (SDOs), public administrations, industries, SMEs, and other institutions. ESPRESSO’s approach emphasises cost reduction and will foster an open market for many actors, avoiding lock-in to proprietary solutions

CRISALIDE – Concept of Corporative Information System for Governance and Management of Digital City

Corporative Information Systems (CIS) is a tool for decision making support for rather big business companies. Such systems were introduced approximately twenty years ago and have shown good results forbusinesses optimization since. The present-day demand is to move cities to a digital era. Considering this demand, let us take a look at a digital city governance and management from CIS ideology point of view. CIS approach based on proposed methodology provides means for development and support of decision making process for different levels of governance and management. Governance and management should notbe centralized, it should be distributed with weak feedback links. In this paper, we present our experience in this field based on "Aqueduct" systems (product of SPIIRAS– HTR&DO Ltd.) implementation for different subject domains and ideas for digital city localization

Smart Governance, the backbone of Smart Planning. A new Strategic Plan for the Cluj-Napoca metropolitan area

Smart Governance is one of the six smart city pillars, as governance is widely considered to be key in ensuring the sustainable development of cities and regions. In the last decades, spatial planning has evolved from a regulatory approach, focused on the delivery of land use plans, to a holistic activity, a meta-governance centred on the coordination of different sectoral policies. According to UN-Habitat, spatial planning is now more than a technical instrument – it is an integrative and participatory decision-making process, a central element in the new paradigm of urban governance. Governance of metropolitan areas is currently one of major concerns for planners all over Europe, major cities (e.g. Berlin, Paris, Rome) are defining schemes for governing this key-scale of action and definition of urban policies. In the case of the European Union, the changes from traditional planning to strategic planning have also been triggered by the fact that strategic plans have often become a prerequisite for accessing structural funds at local level. This was also the case for the Cluj-Napoca metropolitan area, comprising Cluj-Napoca, the second largest city in Romania, and 18 rural communes, with a total population of around 400,000 inhabitants. The metropolitan area, although created through the voluntary association of communes, was an artificial structure, lacking any governance and collaboration mechanisms. In June 2015, we were appointed to design the metropolitan area’s new integrated development strategy for 2016-2020 – a prerequisite for accessing funds from Romania’s Regional Operational Programme. The design of the strategic plan was based on a participative planning approach, already tested as a methodology within the STATUS Project (SEE 2007-2013) . As a result, a series of thematic workshops were held with local stakeholders, ranging from local and county public authorities to decentralised institutions, utility suppliers, NGOs, cluster associations, universities and private companies. The aims of these workshops were twofold: to gather information from the local stakeholders regarding the issues in the metropolitan area and potential solutions, as well as to encourage the collaboration between stakeholders facing similar issues. The ideas expressed in the workshops were distilled by the project team into nine development axes for the strategic plan. We considered governance to be the plan’s central axis, with the success of the other eight sectoral axes (housing, mobility, energy, environment, etc.) greatly dependent on its progress. Our main proposal was the creation of a Metropolitan Task Force, composed of the main stakeholders participating at the workshops, that would be in charge with monitoring the implementation of the plan and ensuring the coordination between the projects in the metropolitan area. The Metropolitan Task Force would function in a Metropolitan Center – a venue encouraging the debate on the future development of the metropolitan area and inviting all interested stakeholders in expressing their ideas on this matter. In the end, we realized a self-assessment of the final strategic plan, rating the innovation and smartness of our proposals (flagship projects, soft projects and complementary projects) for each of the nine development axes. The conclusion was that the governance, housing and social axes were characterized by a great degree of innovation – with proposals such as the realization of a metropolitan housing plan or the creation of CLLD initiatives to combat urban poverty –, while the mobility and leisure/tourism axes were considered to be the least innovative. The strategic plan of the Cluj-Napoca metropolitan area is more than a vision accompanied by a list of projects. It is just the start of a process aimed at fostering collaboration and dialogue between different stakeholders, that need to make the transition now from the co-design of the plan to the co-implementation of its projects. Smart Governance is the backbone of Smart Planning, as our recent initiatives in the Cluj-Napoca metropolitan area – mainly mobility and energy projects – highlight the fact that a wide stakeholder involvement can bridge the gap between industry and public administration and lead to integrated project ideas aimed at fostering territorial development

Crowd Flow Analysis for Measuring the Impact of Urban Transformation Actions in City’s Heritage Areas

In the past years, cities have become more and more interested in shifting from the traditional ideology-based approach to an evidence-based process of policy and decision making. Subsequently, much attention has been given to new tools and technologies for enhancing data collection on the urban transformation practices. With the help of these new tools and technologies, big social, economic and spatial data are collected which allow a more accurate analysis of urban processes in order to create more livable, inclusive and attractive cities. This paper outlines a data-guided approach shaped by evidence for cultural-led urban regeneration in creative and knowledge cities, tested in the framework of a H2020-funded project (GA 730280), ROCK (www.rockproject.eu). Its elementary concept is based on developing an innovative, collaborative and circular systemic approach for regeneration and adaptive reuse of historic city centres, transferring the circular economy model to the transformation process of urban historic environments. In this project, transformative actions such as adaptive reuse, temporary structures and events are used to transform public spaces and buildings that have heritage value. By these actions, it is aimed to increase the quality, raise awareness of people and attract more visitors to these places. This paper focuses on how the large-crowd location-based monitoring tool (LBA sense1) is contextualised in two of the Role Model Cities involved in the project: Cluj-Napoca (Romania) and Turin (Italy) in order to understand the impact of transformative actions in heritage districts. In a highly dynamic urban environment, people’s flow remain the only constant, expressing the lively dimension of changes in the urban fabric (M. Castells, 2000). The paper is based on a systematic analysis on data collected over time in the two cities, using a set of locally-deployed WiFi sensors and providing real-time insights on activity and mobility patterns within the monitored area. It highlights the accessibility dimension to specific contextual data on crowd flows (during ordinary days and extraordinary/ exceptionally events) in different CH locations in the city, related both to traditional heritage spots, as well as to the empty and underused spaces stock, as potential new locations for creative and cultural purposes. The method used follows an origin-destination matrix approach, aimed at comparing various crowd flows during different times in the two cities in relation to specific events/ happenings impacting the usual/ conventional use of space. Throughout the comparison, the paper showcases many similarities (such as situational-driven people movement between certain locations), despite the self-evident distinction ofhotspots spatial distribution within the two cities and the different urban planning and design background and culture. Finally, the analysis proposes a set of policy measures based on informed documentation of the actual use of the urban space during ordinary and extraordinary events impacting the urban environment

Agro-Cities as a Way to Counteract Urban Poverty

Monterusciello represents a case of urban poverty induced by a natural disaster: the bradyseism of 1983 which shocked and drastically changed the lives of citizens residing in the historic center of Pozzuoli. The political and technical response to the natural disaster emerged through the realization of a new town providing housing for displaced persons. Monterusciello was designed as a new town alternative to the construction models of the late 70s and early 80s: in here, there are no high-density buildings or a lack of public spaces. This new town had high ambitions in terms of planning the new housing settlement, inspired by a classical forma urbis and a human scale architecture. Despite the intellectual and political effort to find an effective solution to a collective drama, which affected most of Pozzuoli's population, many things did not work. The current public administration is making an ambitious attempt to face and solve the many open issue linked to this serious context of urban poverty. The city of Pozzuoli (Metropolitan area of Napoli) is the only city on South-Europe that succeeded to get, in the first round of the extremely competitive call for proposal, the EU financing named UIA (Urban Innovative Action). The project has the courage to propose ground-breaking solutions for very serious and persisting problems linked to urban poverty in the Monterusciello neighborhood. Innovation is embedded in applying the methodology of the permaculture to regenerate the public land available in between buildings of Monterusciello. Thirty hectares of Municipal open areas will be transformed into farmland, developed the innovative techniques of permaculture in order to spearhead an economic process and urban growth as a means to combat poverty. This Urban Agriculture led regeneration is based on a solid participatory planning process that aims to solve the many existing problems on the ground through learning and training actions (schools and youngster as priority target groups), experimentation of production chains at km zero, use of innovative and ecologic techniques in producing goods, design of cooperativistic a business model for the financial sustainability, relevant investment in advanced design of available public land and space, with a special focus on urban landscape related questions. This paper is presenting the urban regeneration adopted strategy in terms of ongoing and experimental planning practices, built up governance relations and creation of a sustainable (economic, socio-cultural; and environmental) development narrative for present and future development in Monterusciello

Digital Human – Introduction

In this article we return again to the idea of representing a person in the modern digital world. In order to make the formalization more correct and meaningful, the classical philosophical heritage was first studied and the conceptual models of a man were formed based on the views of leading philosophers of the past and present. Due to understandable limitations, only a portion of the research in the field of philosophy is presented here. Taking into account modern achievements in computer science, especially in the field of AI, it is proposed to consider a computer model of a person consisting of two phenomena: a human profile and a trace. A computer can work with these concepts, despite the complexity and ambiguity in the minds of many people

Digital Space of a Human: From Philosophy to Computer Science

This paper continues the discussion of ideas published in our previous articles for CORP conference related to a concept of a man in a modern world. The greatest attention is paid to the concept of human digital space. This concept, in our opinion, is the key to understanding the role and the place of modern man in the digital era, which has created a number of serious challenges to a man himself and, with certain development, can threaten his basic foundations of existence as a human being. The paper also draws attention to such a problem as interaction of people with each other and interaction of people with machines

Smart City and Digital Humanities

This project presents an extension of a discussion of ideas related to the upcoming global digitization and the role and place of a person in the digital world. The digital environment of a human being and society was discussed in a number of papers and reports at scientific conferences, magazines and books. This work makes an attempt to determine possible forms of our future society based on an example of historical development of human society and taking into account growing digitization of all aspects of life. CRISALIDE project (City Replicable and Integrated Smart Actions Leading Innovation to Develop Urban Economies) started in October 2018 and was one of the very few projects co-funded by EU and Russian Federation through the Horizon2020 programme and the ERA-NET RUS PLUS (ENRP) program. Participants of the CRISALIDE project were the following companies: SUPC Ltd. (Russian Federation), URBASOFIA (Romania), EMaTTech (Greece), SPIIRAS-HTR&DO Ltd. (Russian Federation) and CORP (Austria). In the CRISALIDE project an Innovative Decision-Making Tool has been developed for Contributions on: • Urban Information Systems and Decision Making • Urban Decision Support Systems • Geo-Information-Infrastructures, Data availability (Basemap, INSPIRE, Open Governmental Data et al.) • Urban Planning context, participation From our point of view a Digital City (DC) is a special terrain or a limited digital world from the one hand but from the other is unlimited as a part of a global information system of the Earth (WWW). This world (DC) contains a number of humans and many of them (not everybody) have their own HDS. At the recent conference, CORP 2016, the idea about free space around a human has been discussed. In this paper we will provide some ideas to next generation of CRISALIDE with tide to humanity

A Core of Robotics Intelligence. A “Green Button” Idea

The report provides an overview of AI methods and tools and of their applicability for creation of robot’s intelligence. By a term “robot” we simultaneously refer to a decision support system in a form of an autonomous device (a traditional robot) and to some system presented in the form of special software that implements the functions of an intelligent assistant. The totality of works on AI can be divided into two areas, two types: • imitation of human intellectual activity; • decision support, autonomous decision making based on inference (usually first-order predicate algebra), or other tools. Our company deals exclusively with systems of the second type. Structure of the paper: (1) An overview of AI: pattern recognition, machine learning, data meaning, neural networks, singular value decomposition (SVD). Here we discuss the advantages and limitations of the most well-known approaches in the field of applied AI methods today. (2) Our experience in AI: knowledge base, ontology, inference machine, scenario approach, ontomodeller, Protege 2000. A brief history of the application of AI methods in our company since the late 90s of the last century is presented. (3) Tactical situation analysis. In our systems, the concept of a tactical situation is the basis for the application of AI in real-time systems and in monitoring systems for various purposes. A tactical situation is a basic concept for determining the reaction to external circumstances and conditions that have arisen for a robot that ensures the fulfilment of a certain mission. (4) Smart city applications. Developed within the framework of the European CRISALIDE project, an intelligent decision support system in the interests of a smart city, is one of the options for implementing basic AI technologies in the interests of urban governance. (5) Future work: RIC technology, discussion: a “Green Button” idea. Based on our experience of theoretical and technological research, a technology system is proposed, a technological platform that can be called a core of robotics intelligence (RIC). This platform allows you to form a full cycle of intelligent control of the robot: • obtaining data on the external environment (robot environment) from various sources, own and external; • evaluation of options for fulfilling one's own mission and making a decision (close to the optimal solution); • monitoring the implementation of the decision; • proofreading of the solution if necessary; • making a decision on the completion of a mission formed for a robot, or a general system for which a decision is made on automatic control without involving (directly) a person. Accumulation of experience and self-training based on the analysis of tactical situations and the results of decisions made. We call this idea a “Green Button” idea

Intelligent Social Network

Recently emerged social networks are gaining momentum and are becoming an integral part of modern life. The introduction of artificial intelligence methods, such as ChatGPT, show the importance of this field of science in computer technology, science and social life. With more than 20 years of experience in the application of AI methods, we consider it appropriate to share ideas for their application in the interests of everyday human activities. Our main proposal concerns the creation of decision support systems based on social networks, localized in the interests of a particular person. The main technologies that we apply are the following: Scenario Approach, which includes the Ontology System, Inference Machine, a Visual Integrated Development Environment, and a number of mathematical approaches that implement machine learning and DSS. First of all, these are: Singular Value Decomposition and Method of United Randomize Indices. Unlike neural networks, these methods have a clear mathematical interpretation and controlled accuracy. Also for their application there is no need for very large statistics