Pilots

UTA members Latitudo 40 and RealSim worked with Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council and Sandyford Business District to base climate adaptation in an ageing business park on evidence rather than assumption. Satellite heat and tree-cover mapping, cooling simulations of nature-based solutions and a district-scale 3D digital twin shaped the design of the new Sandyford Civic Park, and show businesses and the public what a greener, cooler district will look like.

CLIMAGRE is a pilot in Grenoble-Alpes Métropole that combines Earth observation, AI analytics, and a 3D Digital Twin to address urban heat island effects. The platform enables users to analyse environmental data, simulate urban scenarios, and assess impacts on heat, vegetation, and carbon storage. It supports data-driven, climate-resilient urban planning and improves decision-making for sustainable city development.

A production-grade urban data platform deployed across the City of Jena, integrating heterogeneous sensor networks, public transport telemetry, traffic signal infrastructure and open geodata into a unified, standards-based data space. The platform underpins multiple smart city services and open data provision.

Florence is testing how public space in its historic centre can be reallocated to sustainable mobility, public transport and climate adaptation, using sensors and digital monitoring to regulate access and check compliance.

Tampere is testing how automated public transport and smart energy solutions can make urban growth more sustainable, with flexible first- and last-mile connections, mobility services for older residents and bi-directional vehicle charging.

The Valencia pilot turns public spaces in the flood-affected southern districts of La Torre, Horno de Alcedo and Castellar-Oliveral into climate-resilient, climate-adapted environments. It aims to produce a model for sustainable urban reconstruction that other European cities can replicate.

Real-life testing of a closed-loop kitchen bio-waste system in the Górnośląsko-Zagłębiowska Metropolia (GZM), covering resident engagement, separate household collection, collection validation, transport conditions and analysis of the municipal organic kitchen waste stream. The pilot covers about 4 000 households in multi-family buildings in Chorzów.

UTA member RealSim worked with Fingal County Council to make statutory planning consultation something residents can explore for themselves. Town-scale 3D digital twins of Balbriggan and Swords, published in a public web viewer and on VR headsets in local libraries, let people walk through proposed public realm schemes in their real context — at street level, at different times of day and in different seasons.

The pilot tested a distributed edge-to-cloud platform for flood detection and rescue-mission coordination, for a major Seine flood scenario in Paris-Saclay, with the 2024 Valencia floods as context. Real-time environmental sensors and on-site edge processing were combined to detect rising water levels faster and keep emergency teams coordinated across a city. The main challenge addressed was connecting scattered, mixed-hardware emergency infrastructure into one fast, reliable system; the solution tested was a self-coordinating network of edge sites able to deploy and scale with minimal manual intervention.

The pilot tested an edge–cloud telemedicine platform bringing real-time health monitoring and rapid emergency response to remote technical workers operating in difficult or isolated environments. The real-customer context was a company that sets up and services wind turbines: hundreds of its workers are based on construction sites in rural and remote areas with limited connectivity, which makes health and safety monitoring difficult. The solution combined portable telemedicine units, wearable devices and edge processing to deliver secure, real-time patient monitoring without depending on a constant link to a central system, and, in emulation with simulated devices, the approach was shown to scale to hundreds of sites across Europe.

AI4LIFE deployed an AI-based smart intersection management system in Istanbul, integrating IoT infrastructure and advanced data analytics to optimize traffic flow, reduce congestion, and improve road safety. By automating the detection of abnormal traffic situations and supporting real-time decision-making, the pilot enhanced operational efficiency and demonstrated the potential of scalable, data-driven solutions for safer and more sustainable urban mobility.

This RAPTOR pilot in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area deployed Kentyou Eye, an AI-powered platform, to transform data from loading and unloading zones into actionable insights. By integrating real-time monitoring, predictive analytics, and data visualisation, the project improved urban freight management, parking demand forecasting, and traffic flow. It enabled more efficient logistics operations and strengthened data-driven decision-making for sustainable metropolitan mobility.

The Fujisawa Smart Parks pilot in Japan demonstrates how digital tools and data analytics can improve urban park management. A mobile app allows staff and citizens to report issues in real time, feeding a central smart city platform. This enables monitoring, predictive maintenance, and better resource allocation, helping the city shift from reactive to proactive, data-driven park services while enhancing citizen engagement. The pilot responded to the Fujisawa Parks Challenge, issued by Fujisawa City, with partners connected through the UTA matchmaking programme.

The Smart Intersection pilot explores how edge computing, video detection and artificial intelligence can improve the monitoring and safety of urban road intersections. The system combines cameras, sensors and machine learning to analyse traffic interactions and detect potentially dangerous situations in real time. Data analytics tools enable cities to better understand traffic behaviour and support both immediate response and long-term planning of road infrastructure. The pilot was carried out under FedIntersect, a project funded through NGI Atlantic that federated the COSMOS testbed in New York City with the SmartSantander testbed in Santander.

Senior Care is an IoT-based tele-assistance solution that uses home sensors to monitor older people’s well-being and detect emergencies or unusual behaviour. The M-Sec components provide secure, interoperable data collection, access control, GDPR-compliant data management, and trusted data sharing. The pilot was conducted in Santander with five users from Atenzia’s network.

The pilot used IoT devices in Parque de las Llamas to collect environmental data, including temperature, humidity, CO₂, volatile organic compounds, and noise, alongside estimated visitor counts. The team placed five environmental sensors across the playground area and along a section extending from the University of Cantabria towards the residential zones. A people-counter device below the park restaurant detected Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MAC addresses. The system sent the data to three destinations. Eclipse sensiNact supported visualisation and analysis. The Crypto Companion Database encrypted the data with an asymmetric key pair, allowing only the owner and authorised operators to access it, and recorded a hash on the Quorum blockchain to protect its integrity. The marketplace made the data available for purchase because it contained no personal data, with buyers paying in M-Sec Tokens, a blockchain-based cryptocurrency. Nine QR codes around the park allowed visitors to open a web app, view their location and decrypted sensor readings, and rate their satisfaction on a five-star scale.

NTT East, Keio University and Fujisawa City ran the Japanese side of M-Sec, the EU–Japan project on multi-layered smart city security. Two use cases took place here: securing an operating mobile sensing platform end to end, and letting residents report on city life by photograph without giving up their privacy. Both fed a cross-border data marketplace shared with Santander.

UTA member Kentyou teamed up with Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), CEA and the Municipality of Trento to improve safety at pedestrian crossings. As part of the DECENTER project, the team installed edge-AI video analytics at two intersections in Trento. The system spots risky situations between pedestrians and vehicles in real time. It keeps personal data secure because it never sends that data to the cloud.

UTA members Keio University and NTT East, working with UTA member city Fujisawa, replaced the city’s paper-based park and public realm maintenance workflow with MinaRepo — a participatory sensing application in which city officers, not residents, file geolocated photographic reports that are routed and tracked digitally. The pilot ran under the EU–Japan BigClouT project, alongside refuse collection vehicles fitted with thirteen types of atmospheric sensor.

Inovallée, CEA-Leti and Grenoble-Alpes Métropole created MyIno App, a web and mobile app that gathers the daily practical information people working in the Inovallée technology park need, from real-time buses and canteen menus to events and a company directory.

UTA members Keio University and NTT East, working with UTA member city Fujisawa, turned moving sources into a city-wide data network under the EU–Japan BigClouT project: city officers filing geolocated photo reports of illegal dumping, missed collections and damaged facilities through the MinaRepo app, refuse collection vehicles measuring air quality street by street with thirteen types of sensor, and festival-goers sharing live crowd updates through an app and signage.

Keio University and Fujisawa City equipped the city’s refuse collection fleet, about 100 vehicles, with omnidirectional cameras mounted underneath, along with GPS, accelerometers, and environmental sensors. As the trucks make their rounds, the cameras continuously record the road surface and roadside. Keio’s research group trained deep neural network object detectors using footage annotated from the sanitation workers’ own drive recorders. This created a system that can spot deteriorating road markings, road-surface damage, dents in guardrails, and debris. Since refuse collection covers every street on a regular cycle, the fleet provides a systematic, repeatable survey of the city’s road infrastructure as a by-product of an existing service, with almost no extra operational cost. The work was part of the EU–Japan BigClouT project and built on an earlier deployment started under ClouT.

Bristol City Council and Bristol is Open, working with Lancaster University as part of the BigClouT group, developed a pollution-aware walking route service on the BigClouT platform, which guides pedestrians along routes that avoid the most congested and polluted streets, not just the shortest ones.

Bristol City Council and Bristol is Open, working with Lancaster University as part of the BigClouT consortium, developed a tool that forecasts household energy use and reveals hidden waste, such as standby load and peak-time demand, to help residents cut costs and avoid energy poverty.

UTA members the University of Tsukuba and NTT East, working with UTA member city Tsukuba, trialled two linked services for international visitors under the EU-Japan BigClouT project: HukuRepo, an Android application delivering real-time tourism, traffic and environmental information, and a problem-reporting channel that routed visitor reports to local volunteers who answered with help or a recommendation.

Wise-IoT, which stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Semantics IoT, brought together six testbeds from Europe and South Korea to run pilots in smart cities, leisure, and healthcare, all using a shared semantic layer. Chamrousse was the leisure testbed, with an application that monitored skier flow and location across the resort. This gave operators a real-time view of where visitors gathered and how they moved between lifts and pistes. FHNW, CEA, the University of Cantabria, Ayuntamiento de Santander, KAIST, and Sejong all contributed, coordinated by EGM. The pilot aimed to show that IoT services built for one platform could work on another without needing to be rewritten, using morphing mediation gateways and trust-based recommendation systems for full semantic interoperability.

The SmartSantander city testbed, run by the University of Cantabria and Santander City Council, was federated with other European and Japanese testbeds in the FESTIVAL project. Experimenters gained common access to city-scale IoT deployments, open data and living labs under an experimentation-as-a-service model.

The city of Genova and its Civil Protection Office developed a mobile information service, building on the Italian “I Don’t Risk” civil protection campaign, to help citizens understand environmental risks and act on them in emergencies. The service combined rules of conduct for critical situations with live weather, hydrological and sensor data, and was tested as a ClouT field trial.

Santander replicated Smiley Coupon, an application first trialled in Fujisawa that issues citizens and visitors personalised coupons according to their degree of smile — the clearest instance of Japan-to-Europe transfer in the project. This application gives customised coupons to citizens and tourists based on how much they smile. It was first developed in Fujisawa and then used in Santander to test if it could work in a different region.

The University of Cantabria and Ayuntamiento de Santander built a map-based mobility application that pulls the city’s transport and environmental data into a single route recommendation. A traveller enters an origin and a destination and receives five options — bike, walking, car, taxi, and bus — each with distance, journey time, and environmental readings along the way. Behind it sit bus timetables, positions, speeds, arrival times and occupancy; bike, taxi and train availability at specific stops; traffic speed and road occupancy; indoor and outdoor parking availability; fixed and mobile sensors measuring carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone and noise; and the traveller’s own preferences and real-time events reported from smartphones.

Fujisawa City and the ClouT group added sensors to garbage trucks to make waste collection easier to measure and improve. Each truck had a custom sensor board with GPS, updating every second, and 13 types of air sensors. Data was sent over 3G every 30 seconds to a remote server. This gave the city a clear way to improve routes and cut mileage and CO₂ emissions, instead of relying only on experience. The same sensors also collected detailed air quality data, like pollen and PM2.5, which was shared with residents. The trial used the ClouT platform, a joint EU–Japan smart city system also used in Santander, Genova and Mitaka. This approach continued in the BigClouT project from 2016 to 2019.