Challenge & Context

Cities of today face many challenges, the first of which is their ability to provide basic goods and services to their inhabitants, including — above all — water.

To achieve the many goals around a state-of-the art water supply and treatment, digital technologies are being adopted. These technologies are playing a critical role in aiding the collection of valuable data in real-time whilst enabling more efficient use of resources. These technologies additionally promise to reduce the pressure of economic and population growth on water consumption.

Special attention is needed in order to integrate digital technologies with existing technologies for managing distribution networks to achieve energy savings, waste reduction and environmental performance, to name but a few.

In the framework of the Interreg 2 Seas SCIFI project, the city of Saint-Quentin (France), in collaboration with the cities of Bruges and Mechelen (Belgium) and Delft (Netherlands), is exploring new ways to improve public services. This project specifically aims to help medium-sized cities create value from data and offer better services. To achieve this goal, SCIFI partner cities are applying innovative procurement procedures, implementing interoperable solutions and data platforms, and opening up their data.

During the SCIFI project, twelve challenges were launched in the field of energy, environment and mobility. Start-ups and SMEs have been selected through calls for proposals to deploy and test their solutions in SCIFI partner cities.

The Green Spaces Department of the Municipality expressed the need to modernize the management of stadium maintenance operations, with a dual objective, to reduce

• water consumption in sports fields by implementing a decision support tool to assess the actual water needs of the turf using open data;
• workload of the staff by setting up a remote control system of the maintenance operations of a field and the equipment associated with it (mowing robots, irrigation system).

When Saint-Quentin decided to embark on the path of digitizing its stadiums, multiple challenges arose during its digital transformation journey such as:

• Integrating and managing the Internet of Things (IoT);
• Collecting, storing and giving access to all data feeding digital solutions;
• Ensuring interoperability between heterogeneous data and systems;
• Building bridges between vertical data silos;
• Translating the needs expressed by end-users into technical requirements to meet expectations;
• Ensuring excellence in coordination in a public market between the different layers composing a digital solution (integrating hardware i.e. sensors, software i.e. business applications and orchestration i.e. the data platform);
• Ensuring the acquisition of interoperable solutions giving more flexibility and sovereignty to the public purchaser.

The SCIFI programme has acted as a catalyst for the city of Saint-Quentin and enabled it to embark on the digital transformation of the management of its sports grounds under the right conditions. Based on the learning experience of the cities, the SCIFI project published a Smart Cookbook for mid-sized cities, a guide compelling their bests ingredients and methods on creating the best smart city projects.

Solution

Figure 1 . Solution architecture

Benefits & Impact

The Department of Green Spaces is the main beneficiary of the project, enabling management modernization of the stadiums in order to gain in efficiency on two levels :

• Optimizing water consumption by adapting watering to actual water needs and eliminating the tendency to over-water the soil. The city recorded its first positive impact during the summer of 2021 as a 35% reduction in water consumption was observed on a field equipped with the intelligent watering solution compared to another field located nearby not equipped with this solution. This result was obtained from a comparison made on similar bases (the same soil composition, period, weather conditions).
• Simplifying and reducing the number of interventions required for stadium maintenance thanks to the remote control of various equipment (mowing robot, irrigation system) and the achievement of a better quality turf resulting in a reduction in the number of mechanical interventions required.

This project allowed the city of Saint-Quentin to accumulate a lot of knowledge about the organization and management of digital projects at several levels (structuring of public procurement, coordination and distribution of responsibilities between the various suppliers, increased sovereignty over key intangible assets such as data models). It has also been able to develop technical knowledge to establish the conditions necessary to deploy solutions that are sufficiently interoperable, replicable and open to allow it to have better control over the projects, their evolution and the data they produce.

The solution implemented in Saint-Quentin can be interesting for any actor working on the subject of irrigation, sustainability of the use of scarce resources and environmental impacts . Its main added value is to have created a platform that connects and integrates different systems into one (system of systems approach), whereas previously these systems operated completely separately (humidity sensors, irrigation system, mowing robots).

The project has been recognized for its impact and innovation through two awards:

• The city of Saint-Quentin was awarded the “Innovative Territories” label in 2021 by the Interconnected Association in the environment category;
• The water savings trophy awarded by the water savings club set up by the Ministry of Ecological Transition and led by the FNCCR (national federation of local authorities and utilities). The City of Saint-Quentin and Easy Global Market won the award in 2021 in the category “actions to reduce water consumption in periods of water stress”;
• The “Territoria bronze” in the digital transition category awarded by the national observatory of public innovation.

Added value through FIWARE

FIWARE technology played a crucial role in the success of the ‘Iintelligent and Autonomous Watering Project’. It allowed the city of Saint-Quentin to meet all the technical requirements and constraints to make the solution fully functional and deliver the expected benefits in the real world. Many digital solutions are deprived of part of their potential due to a lack of interoperability and the ability to interact with other systems. FIWARE makes it possible to overcome such limitations. In the specific case of the project in Saint-Quentin, FIWARE has made it possible to provide answers to the challenges faced in any process of digitization of public services:

• Creating bridges between different sources in order to combine data previously organized in silos. For example, it was possible to reuse data relating to the reservation schedule for sports fields for purposes other than those initially planned, such as remotely planning watering operations or automatically adapting the schedule for mowing robots;
• Using open standards to ensure interoperability between systems that are technically designed to operate independently of one another but need to be evolved to interact with each other within a system of systems. For example, a central element of the project was to make the decision support system for irrigation scheduling interoperable with the irrigation system already in place on the land so that the latter could be operated based on the recommendations of the former.

FIWARE has been vital in helping Saint-Quentin manage the challenges encountered in its project to digitize the management of sports fields. This technology offers what can be called a common language that facilitates the management and interactions between the different elements involved in a digital project (the application, the hardware, and the information system of the community).