NetZero Smart Cities offer a unique opportunity to create more sustainable, liveable communities. By harnessing the power of digital twins and using technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and 5G, smart cities can reduce their environmental impact, while improving the residents’ quality of life. Beside technology solutions, a NetZero Smart City will use open data access for citizens and other stakeholders to become NetZero developers. For this, there are two main infrastructure needs: a Living Lab and a Digital Twin (DT) platform.
The Living Lab infrastructure is a real-life infrastructure that mirrors a city. The living lab is necessary to be the real-life playground for innovative solutions that must be tested, piloted, demonstrated, and validated, involving all the stakeholders. The major issue of public innovation solutions is that the TRL level is still low, and this is associated with a difficulty of adoption of the solutions at a city-wide scale [5]. A living lab will be the bridge between the technological push, that is derived from the power of data and IT infrastructure, and the demand pull from the stakeholders that want a more sustainable city. Therefore, in this specific RDI project, we propose a multi-dimensional Smart Campus living lab that will extend from the campus area of National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest (UNSTPB) to the other partners in the project, such as UTCN or UTCB. The UPB campus will act as the main demo site, but the Smart Campus will extend virtual to the other partners in the project. This Smart Campus living lab will be a place for co-creation between stakeholders, that will enhance user-driven open innovation in real-life settings having users testing and validating products and services for different scenarios.
The UPB campus covers 1km2 and has pedestrian and driving roads that are governed by the traffic signs (STOP, Speed Limitation, Speed bumpers). The Campus has more than 15 buildings for students and staff with two new Green buildings with more than 8000 m2 each, one kindergarten and a primary school, tennis/football and basketball courts, an event aula for 10,000 people, a library, a heat co-generation factory that is injecting part of the energy into the grid, a passive self-sustainable living home, and a printing factory. There are more than 30,000 people living each day in the Campus, making it a small city. The main goal of the living lab will be to implement and monitor solutions that will reduce the carbon footprint at Smart Campus level with the involvement of all the actors. In terms of living labs solutions to be transferred to the city, there are several challenges, the most important one being the assessment whether the solutions validated and tested are scalable and how they will handle massive heterogenous data collections.
Another key component of a NetZero Smart City is the Digital Twin (DT), defined as a digital replica of living and non-living entities that enable any interaction happening in the real world to be transmitted in the digital world and vice-versa. Hence, the DT is an ever-evolving platform that stores historical and current data of the real-life twins and helps monitoring, creating new models and trends, and even creating what-if simulation scenarios from which one can extract insights that can affect the real physical twin. The main technologies that are part of the DT are: Internet of Everything (IoE) – a concept that uses sensors and actuators to extract insights from the physical world; Big Data – a technology that connects massive amounts of data using IoE but also other sources like Social Networks; Artificial Intelligence – algorithms used to extract insights about the real-life twin, its future behaviour or how different aspects are influencing it; Communication – technologies that power the data flow from the real-world Twin to the Digital one (such as 5G technology); Cybersecurity – the data has to be secured and privacy has to be implemented in building the DT; Synchronous interactions – allowing the twins to interact and to influence each other, improving the quality of life of the real twin and allowing the DT to evolve based on the measurements and interactions of the real twin. All these components will be implemented in the NetZero Smart Campus DT platform, making it the all-in-one Box solution to be transferred to NetZero Smart Cities.
The platform data will be open to all stakeholders to use and to develop applications and services that will benefit the NetZero Smart Cities. One of the major issues with DT platforms for smart cities is the heterogeneous data, the fact that different twins don’t communicate between each other. For example, measuring the CO2 concentration in a given area and the traffic pattern, a DT platform should suggest a commuter an alternative way to travel that will decrease the level of CO2 in that area. To overcome this issue, we aim to introduce the idea of Convergent Digital Twins. A Convergent DT will interconnect data and services from all Smart Cities dimensions, which would be a horizontal application between all the Specific RDI Projects in this proposal. Furthermore, the Convergent DT will also interconnect multiple cities, which is a vertical application, going from more advanced smart cities to less advanced ones. Hence, multiple smart cities will be interconnected by such a DT, which will make it easier for public authorities to identify causes of related problems from other DTs in the same situation. There will be models created that will interact with each other both for Smart Cities as well as models for each physical object or industry type DT. The communication technology used will be 5G, as the Ultra-low Latency and High Reliability use case is optimal for a Smart City DT, together with the possibility to have low-energy consumption 5G cells that will reduce the overall communication carbon footprint. Thus, the main objective of this RDI project is to create a NetZero Smart Campus living lab environment by the end of the project. We will accomplish this goal by using the UPB Campus as a living lab for piloting NetZero solutions and by creating a Digital Twin platform that will collect data from all the IoT sensors, using the 5G infrastructure, analyse them and present relevant results to the citizens or developers or decision-making authorities. Accomplishing this goal will result in creating smart policies for reducing carbon footprint and empowering citizens and businesses to be NetZero at an individual/company level.
The figure shows the five work packages proposed, as well as how they integrate and interact with other Specific RDI Projects. Concretely, work package 1 will deal with designing and implementing the data and communication infrastructure for the NetZeRoCities open data platform, which will be implemented on top of it in Work Package 2. Then, Work Package 3 will be responsible for designing and implementing the Digital Twin and its various intelligent services in the platform, which will offer analysis, predictions, and other forms of useful knowledge obtained from the data in the NetZeRoCities platform. Specific RDI Projects 2, 3, and 4 will contribute to the platform with data, and will also be able to extract data as needed. In parallel, work package 4 will handle the creation of the Smart Campus concept, where solutions from Specific Projects 2, 3, and 4 will be piloted and evaluated. Furthermore, Specific RDI Project 1 will also benefit from work package 4, because the results of the piloting will be useful in the policy making at the governance level. Finally, work package 5 will deal with the dissemination and exploitation of the results from the other work packages and engaging the community.