Susie presented the EPIC (European Platform for Intelligent Cities) initiative on the 29th of March to a range of council administrators and decision makers in Manchester, one of the four key pilot cities in the project. Susie provided the context around the project explaining EPIC’s mission to fully harness the power of ICT by bringing together Living Labs, future internet and cloud computing technologies to enable cities across Europe to collaborate, innovate, create and deliver genuinely smarter citizen and business centred services. Her presentation was followed by a demonstration by Hildebrand of the smart web service ‘energyhive’ that will be piloted in Manchester using the EPIC platform.
‘energyhive’ is an energy monitoring project, which allows users to view household energy consumption via a web-based dashboard. The service collates household data at regular intervals via a number of energy monitoring units from within the home. This data can then be stored on a cloud-based storage system and the newly gained information can be used by both citizens and cities for intelligent and informed decision making. The purpose of the Manchester workshop was to communicate the SMART City concept to a representative stakeholder group and gather feedback and user requirements.