Stockholm Royal Seaport is the largest urban development area in Sweden, which upon completion will consist of at least 12,000 new homes and 35,000 workplaces. Since 2009 it has been appointed a sustainability-profiled area by the City of Stockholm City Council; designated with the task of testing and developing new solutions and processes for a more sustainable future.
The strategic sustainability team working on developing the Royal Seaport project has long understood that there is great potential in increased use of digital data and open or shared data to support the sustainability work; both from an overarching follow-up/development perspective and for the development of new services. Several research initiatives have been conducted in the area.
In February 2022, the results from a research and development project, “Connected Stockholm Royal Seaport” were presented. For three years the project explored how Internet of Things (IoT) and increased data sharing can be used as a tool in the sustainability work. Several pilot tests have been conducted within resource flows in properties, green areas and parks, and travel habits and mobility. Based on these pilot tests, project partners developed a largely new IoT platform based on the Fiware standard. Another key activity was collaboration between City of Stockholm´s departments and companies and contribution to the establishment of forums for dialogue around city-wide challenges in the development of IoT. An important framework for the project has been the strategy for Stockholm as a “smart and connected” city, adopted by the city council in 2017.
During the project, the city has gained an increased understanding of the possibilities with IoT as well as a deeper understanding of what is required by the city to implement IoT-solutions and create value of collected data.
Some high-level learnings from the project include that the different administrations within the city would benefit from increased cooperation around data collection and development of joint requirements on data sources and suppliers. Also, the focus of Connected SRS has largely been on the technical opportunity to collect data, still much work remains regarding organizational capabilities and capacity to receive, manage, and create value with collected and shared data.
Some key areas and questions identified in the continued development scaling the use of IoT-data within the city include:
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The establishment of processes and decision support to identify and decide on information ownership, especially when there are many different uses and users of a specific IoT-data set.
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Definition of roles and responsibilities for the system solution and sensors/edge-units throughout the life cycle.
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Business models for sensors and shared data.
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Competence and resource needs within the city administrations and municipal companies.
For more information and contact, visit the project website (more information available on the Swedish site).