Metropolitan cities are among the main places of economic and cultural activity of the 21st century. The growing urbanization and aggregation of metropolitan territorial communities, sustainable development, citizen engagement, economic and cultural attractiveness and governance are among the most important issues facing modern cities. The increasing complexity of these issues and the technological development are leading to an urgent need and the opportunity to radically rethink how we build and operate our cities.
This project aims at studying and developing innovative methods and technologies to offer new intelligent solutions to improve city attractiveness, resource management, and the safety and quality of the life of citizens through the close combination of use and experimentation of advanced communication infrastructure and widespread sensors, and the study and development of innovative vertical solutions.
In particular, the project will be focused on the following topics:
- open technologies for ubiquitous communication and distributed sensing;
- aggregation, processing, and distribution or big data/open data;
- citizen's safety from environmental hazards;
- energy awareness, and development of intelligent networks for energy distribution;
- scalable distribution and display of large amounts of data, with particular reference to numerical simulation and data from the cultural heritage sector.
The project is also accompanied by a dissemination and training plan, in which three Summer Schools will be organized on the subject of Urban Informatics.
The project is part of a broader framework that aims to make Sardinia one of the most important regions in the development and application of innovative technologies for smart cities. In particular, project experiments will be carried out, at a metropolitan city scale, through an agreement with the Municipality of Cagliari and also by means of the computing and network infrastructures made available by the Joint Innovation Center - JIC, located in the scientific and technological park POLARIS (Pula, Cagliari).