The Internet-of-Everything (IoE) platform prototype phase for Select for Cities is coming to a close after all participants gathered in Helsinki this week. 21c Managing Director, Susie Ruston McAleer, joined the procuring cities of Antwerp and Helsinki, along with Living Lab experts, SMIT Lab imec, to undertake an official evaluation of the prototypes.
This year the five Contractors have been developing large-scale Internet-of-Everything platforms that bring together city data sources and provide services to extract actionable intelligence from the data and facilitate collaboration and open innovation.
Based upon an understanding of the market, and the needs of the R&D procuring cities of Antwerp and Helsinki, each Contractor developed their own approach to meeting the complex requirements for a city platform. From the need to be open-source to delivering high levels of usability, scalability and security, the platforms needed to go beyond the state-of-the-art of existing solutions on the market.
Five testing iterations during this period enabled the procuring cities to provide regular feedback directly to the Contractors who used the information to further improve their platforms. The Helsinki meeting was a final opportunity for the Contractors to showcase their solutions to the procuring Cities and explain their innovative differentiators and commercialisation activities to date.
The procuring cities are now evaluating how well the different solutions have met the Select for Cities requirements. The Contractors who successfully pass the prototyping phase will be notified by the 1st August and will be invited to bid for the final R&D Phase, - Living Lab testing.