The City Enabler is one of the three candidates awarded contracts to start the third and final phase of Pre-commercial Procurement (PCP) Select for Cities.
During the last edition of Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, held November 13-15 in the Spanish Mediterranean city, EIT Digital's co-funded Innovation Activity CEDUS was announced winner of the 2018 Select for Cities Challenge, which aims to design, research and develop a data-driven, Internet-of-Everything (IoE) platform for European cities to enable large-scale co-creation, testing and validation of urban IoE apps and services.
The consortium led by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SpA, together with EIT Digital and ATC International, embraces in this last phase also two new local partners: Rombit in Belgium and Aalto University in Finland.
The City Enabler is the ecosystem digital platform powered by FIWARE supporting cities in synchronizing and harmonizing Data and IOT at urban level.
SELECT for Cities started its pre-commercial procurement (PCP) to obtain R&D services to develop and build large-scale, city-wide, Internet-of-everything platforms to facilitate collaboration and open innovation. The process is highly competitive, and during the previous Phase II, five contractors produced platform prototypes which used open standards to visualise and analyse city data to generate actionable intelligence. All of the five were invited to bid for Phase III during which the innovative platforms are to be tested in real-life settings in Helsinki, Finland and Antwerp, Belgium.
The third phase of the execution stage is expected to end in September 2019.
"The three Contractors entering phase III all have very strong solutions" said Hugo Goncalves, of Forum Virium Helsinki, the project lead for SELECT for Cities. "SELECT for Cities is very proud to play a significant role in accelerating their development and is looking forward to seeing their impact in the city test beds over the next year".
Stéphane Péan, Digital Cities Action Line Leader at EIT Digital presented the City Enabler in front of hundreds of people during SCEWC 2018 and pointed: "The City Enabler, winner of SELECT for Cities, is now a reference in Europe. This smart open-source solution does not only support cities and empower people and businesses but also accelerates the digital cities market. Supported by EIT Digital, it has already started its deployment in several European cities as well as South America."
This Pre-Commercial Procurement, the first one in the world to focus on the Internet-of-Everything is a multi-country and multi-partner joint effort, implemented by a consortium composed of several partners of Forum Virium Helsinki (Finland) as project lead, Digipolis (Belgium) as partner and lead procurer, Antwerp (Belgium) as procuring entity with Copenhagen (Denmark), imec IMEC (Belgium) and 21c (UK). The project is supported by the European Commission through its H2020 programme.
