Key stakeholders are taking a comprehensive approach to rethinking smart city innovation. City leaders have collaborated through partnerships involving government, research institutions and solution providers. The Copenhagen Solutions Lab is one of the leading organizations at the forefront of this movement. By bringing together manufacturers with municipal buyers, the Copenhagen Solutions Lab has catalyzed the development and deployment of next-generation smart city innovations. Copenhagen is leveraging this unique approach to accelerate the implementation of smart city solutions. One of the primary focus areas is LED street lighting.

Barcelona’s heavy traffic and its associated high levels of pollution were the primary factors that motivated some companies and universities to work on strategies for improving traffic in the city centre. Bitcarrier is one of the technologies involved in the In4Mo Project, whose main objective is to develop the applications that form the core of smart mobility, one of the fundamental pillars of the smart city concept.

Birmingham wanted to attract more investment, generate more employment, promote sustainability and offer a better quality of life to their citizens. Birmingham needed a solution that can solve the following problems: „lack of statutory authority to enforce specific technology requirements, absence of universal standards to disparate networks, fragmented and incomplete GIS information about city utilities, bureaucratic nature of civic planning processes, rising demand for high-speed connectivity and need for more bandwidth and power for data-intensive services.

The local administration of the city of Nice faced a critical mobility situation which was causing serious management problems and pollution harmful to the quality of life of its citizens. The objective of the project developed with our partners for the Nice administration was to reduce the vehicle flow to the city centre and encourage the use of alternative transport.

The City of Eindhoven is aimed to manage a street in the center of town - Stratumseind - the longest and most vibrant street in the Netherlands with more than 50 bars and nightclubs.

Vienna City Council needed a new way to deliver a better service, higher quality care and more transparency while cutting costs and minimizing bureaucracy. The chosen solution must have the following requirements: consolidation of multiple data within a single management system, a user-friendly interface, compliance with new regulatory requirements, „cultural sensitivity to the differing requirements of multiple faiths, and more transparency for tracking cases.

Always seeking innovation, BH Technologies was studying an energy saving solution for its public lighting equipment. The company based in Grenoble (France) wanted a simple and autonomous system with high-level accuracy vehicle detection to be integrated with its public lighting control solution.

US Highway 2 at Kalispell, Montana, features a dangerous, non-signalized intersection that has been the site of numerous crashes. The two-lane, high-speed highway intersects with Springcreek Road/Dern Road and has no turn lane. The goal of the project was to improve safety at the intersection without adding lanes or installing signals. Because there is no turn lane, when eastbound cars need to turn left onto Springcreek Road they are forced to stop in the lane of travel and hope that cars approaching from behind see them and stop in time. Unfortunately, too many drivers didn’t see the stopped vehicles until it was too late, resulting in numerous crashes. The posted speed limit on that stretch of US Highway 2 is 65 mph, and the road is heavily traveled by large semis. Finally, funding issues made a build-out of the intersection unfeasible.

Onesti City Hall current data center infrastructure is manly used for internal use and adding more servers and licenses rise the cost of public expenditure. Additionally, Onesti City Hall wants a secure system that will can interact with the local community to rise the engagement of the citizens using their mobile devices.

Incheon City’s transportation agency needed a traffic management system that could keep traffic moving by identifying areas of congestion and offering alternative routes to drivers. The goal of the system was to reduce the societal costs associated with traffic congestion as well as the pollution caused by vehicle emissions. “Incheon City officials are committed to reducing pollution,” says David Lee, who represents Wavetronix in South Korea. “The catchphrase here is ‘low carbon monoxide and green traffic systems.’”Incheon City has a population of more than 2.6 million and is home to South Korea’s largest airport and largest western seaport. These factors result in a large and unpredictable stream of traffic on the city’s roadways, and the heavy congestion has led to inefficient roads and high levels of air pollution. Because traffic flow through the city can alternate in unpredictable patterns, traffic engineers need real-time traffic volumes, lane occupancy and per vehicle speeds in order to determine when and where alternative routes should be made available. This detection is required 24 hours a day, seven days a week and must run efficiently with little downtime in order to keep these unpredictable traffic flows moving smoothly. Because the city is often covered in fog, video detection is rendered unusable; inductive loops, while accurate in fog, require extensive and expensive installation and maintenance. This efficiency became especially important as Incheon City prepared to host the 2014 Asian Games, which were expected to cause even more traffic, especially at the airport and on the newly-completed, 13 mile (21 km) Incheon Grand Bridge, which offers another route between Yeonjong Island, where the airport is located, and the mainland.

The city needed a low maintenance, highly reliable communications system that was sufficiently robust for the delivery of constant updates to the kiosks. One of the problems facing the developers was that the environment in which these connections are maintained runs the gamut: under roadways and rail lines, next to hot cabling in the transit system through a variety of soil and wetness conditions. Depending on weather conditions, the transmission capabilities of the various physical media can vary widely.

As one of the biggest megatrends of the 21st century, urbanization affects both recent and established industrial countries. In the European Union, already more than 70 percent of the population live in an urban area. In Germany, the uninterrupted urban growth is likely to pose huge challenges for many municipalities in the future, in areas like traffic, energy, environment and health. For this reason, innovative solutions in terms of city planning and city development are required. Additionally, increasingly demanding citizens expect a high quality of life and improved citizen services. To address those challenges, traditional routes must be tested, old infrastructures modernized and administrative processes organized more efficiently.