SELECT for Cities is based on the notion that cities across the globe are on a continuous search for new and innovative technologies, methods and tools to foster innovation, as well as to create value for both business and citizens, in order to transform into ‘Smart Cities’. The project brings together three cities (Antwerp, Copenhagen, Helsinki) that want to compare different Smart City solutions via an increasing competitive tendering approach.

“By using Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) to challenge the market to develop large-scale Internet-of-Everything platforms SELECT for Cities is unlocking a range of new tools and approaches that will transform the way cities catalyse open innovation to deliver world class services. We are currently in the platform prototyping phase with five contractors, four of which are using FIWARE components to address our aims.” said Hugo Gonclaves, Select for Cities Coordinator and Project Development Manager for Forum, Virium Helsinki. “The competition for contractors to not only meet complex technical standards, but also a variety of end-user needs is fierce and we are looking forward to seeing how well FIWARE performs compared to other approaches.”

Following the first phase, which is based on the documentation of the architecture and, in some cases, early prototypes, five solutions were selected to participate in the second phase, out of which Engineering, Orchestra Cities, FIWOO, and the Snap4City Platform are using FIWARE components. Phase two, which moves from architecture design to early prototyping and live testing by the city officers, will end in June 2018. After that the selected platforms will move on to the third phase. This will involve prototype testing in selected scenarios within the three cities.

FIWOO (Bosonit, Secmotic, JIG and Emergya)

“FIWOO was conceived and developed as an open platform in response to the SELECT for Cities challenge by the four Spanish companies Bosonit, Secmotic, JIG, and Emergya. It integrates FIWARE as its core mainly because it is the de facto open standard for smart cities and has a large supporting developing community. Also, FIWARE provides a set of modular tools and APIs for different functionalities, facilitating tasks such as integrating IoT devices, analyzing and processing large and medium data, or incorporating advanced interfaces for interacting with users. Additionally, both Secmotic and JIG are gold members of the FIWARE Foundation, which indicates the team’s deep knowledge of the technology and the commitment with the community.” says Sara Madariaga, Head of PMO Bosonit S.L.

Orchestra Cities (Martel Innovate, Ubiwhere and Therapaenis)

Federico M. Facca, Head of Martel Lab, stated: “Select4Cities is a very interesting challenge. When we read about it back in January 2017, we immediately thought we have to take part to it and build something amazing! With Martel long story and strong expertise on FIWARE, it was natural to build on it and contribute back to it. Orchestra Cities is designed to offer a cloud platform where different cities can collaborate according to their needs. Also small ones can enter paying for what the use. To build Orchestra Cities, we leverage on Kubernetes to deploy and manage different key FIWARE enablers, such as Context Broker, IoT Agents, and Cygnus. We are combing such components with state of the art solutions for Data Flow management, Dashboard creation and API Management, to build an amazing platform to Co-create the Smart Cities of Tomorrow Cities.

 

Select4Cities are very demanding, but this is also pushing us to do better! We will do our best to enter Phase 3!”

Snap4City (DISIT Lab at UNIFI, UNIMI and Effective Knowledge)

“Snap4City team, coordinated by DISIT lab of UNIFI, with UNIMI and Effective Knowledge, is developing a solution for the Select4Cities challenge and PCP by using IOT Orion Broker of FIWARE, plus a number of IOT brokers for covering [sic] a large number of protocols. The Snap4City solution proposed is capable to cover [sic] the whole set of Select4Cities features by exploiting Km4City platform and technologies and providing a number of new and innovative tools, thus creating an integrated Open Source suite for IOT/IOE.” said Paolo Nesi, Professor at the University of Florence.

Team Engineering Ingegneria Informatica

A collaboration between Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A, Italy (Lead Contractor), ATC International SPRL, Belgium and EIT Digital IVZW, Belgium.