Case Study: Intelligent Management Platform Transforms Lisbon into a Smart & Sustainable City

United Nations has set 17 Sustainable Development Goals, designed to be a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. Its 11th goal target the development needed for sustainable cities and communities. This 11th goal consists various targets. Some of these include to ensure access of safe and affordable housing & transport system, provide basic services and upgrade slums for all by 2030. Plus it focuses on the aim to strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the cultural and natural heritages in the world.

Many countries and cities have started working towards to achieve these goals. One of these cities is Lisbon, a capital of Portugal. The Lisbon City Council was facing issues to improve quality of life for its 500,000 inhabitants, while accommodating the flow of approximately one million travelers into the city each day. Council was aware that quality data is a major factor for city’s better management, but the required information was scattered throughout a complex and inflexible network.

To make Lisbon a future ready ‘smart-city’, council decided to enhance connectivity and utilize available data to provide improved services to its citizens. To implement scheme, it needed a partner that could help to build a smart infrastructure platform having various types of data sources.

Lisbon City Council's Chief Data Officer, Joao Tremoceiro said, "City managers of today have challenges that did not exist in the past. Citizens expect much faster response and many problems faced by modern cities can only be solved by intelligent platforms that integrate data to allow the government to be proactive and for different agencies to collaborate and act as one".

Lisbon City Council started looking for a partner which will be able to improve its processes and platform tools and it selected NEC. NEC provides safe, secure and efficient technological solutions for Japanese and foreign or local governments, governmental agencies, public institutions and other organizations.

After the collaboration, NEC implemented its smart platform—Lisbon Intelligent Management Platform—which is able to aggregate, manage and display the required data received from the municipality’s information systems and from about 30 public/private institutions.

The platform’s data structure and system architecture allowed the integration of municipality's multiple sector wise applications. So, the information consolidated with multi format access helped to display important indicators and vectors, allowed collaborative and integrated management of Lisbon’s operations.

Based on Fiware, the Lisbon’s Platform leverages IoT technology and open APIs to collect, store and analyze the provided data. This implementation ensures that the city’s Council is not tied down to any specific technology supplier. About IoT implementation, Mr. Tremoceiro commented, "It is very important that the Lisbon Intelligent Management Platform is an open architecture platform, because it allows us to avoid vendor lock-in, connect new pieces from different suppliers, as well as easily share our data with other organisations, universities or partners".

Also, the data captured by various installed sensors and surveillance cameras helped to enhance public safety and operational efficiencies. Considering city’s waste management, approximately 2,000 smart garbage bins have sensors so that when they are full, sends notifications. This initiative has improved the efficiency of waste collection. As waste service employees only clear the filled bins, technology has helped to improve the resource management too.

The intelligent platform has helped Lisbon to alleviate traffic congestion issues, and reap benefits in air quality. Lisbon's e-mobility initiatives include a public e-bike sharing scheme—comprising conventional and electric bicycles—that encourage citizens to switch from cars or other mobility options to e-bikes.

In the area of public safety and security, video analytics enables to quickly analyze and report any suspicious behavior to service providers by providing real-time actionable insights. This initiative has helped the government organizations to respond to these incidents and enable the collaboration among the numerous public safety agencies.

Regarding this implementation, Mr. Fernandes explained, “Integrating the intelligent platform with all the emergency service players has allowed collaboration between different agencies, such as the Police, the Fire Brigade and the Civil Protection, and automated workflows for each type of incident. All the entities can now act proactively to address each type of occurrence, and allow the effectiveness of their operation to be monitored”.

So, this way NEC’s smart platform enabled the Lisbon Council to continuously improve Lisbon city’s public safety and security, its mobility. Also, it bolstered the efficiency in management of the city operations, social cohesion and upgraded the life of its citizens.