Scope

Selection of standards, interoperability, scalability, energy efficiency and green enablement, smart transportation, e-services, disaster preparedness and resilience, and convergence to Digital Twins.

Vision

The comprehensive incorporation of the Internet of Things (IoT) is a key enabler for data-driven city management, providing municipalities with reliable digital twins that support both operational reliability and strategic planning.

Core Principle

Data is the critical asset; devices are merely tools. Since "a digital twin is what you feed it" this group prioritises data quality while recognising that “testing before investing” is significantly more cost-effective. It requires a selection process before deployment that will form the basis for feedback.

Strategic Objectives

1. Build City 5.0: A Human-Adaptive City

Cities must protect long-term investments by developing human-centric, sustainable, open, and interoperable city services over a hyper-connected network of devices linked to an Urban Operating System to integrate every data space available for data-driven management of the city. Success depends on:
Interoperability
Scalability
Cybersecurity
A shared semantic and context for every data in use, with traceback.
Collaborative work based on technology adoption and promotion

2. Harmonise IoT Standards Across Device Generations

Current IoT challenges include:
Multiple competing standards
Legacy devices coexisting with new ones
Incompatible data formats across manufacturers and time periods
Proposed solution: Align low-level object standardisation (e.g., OMA SpecWorks) with high-level frameworks (e.g., FiWARE Smart Data Models) to advance the Solution Architecture Template based on eGovERA reference architecture.

3. Foster Integrated Public-Private Collaboration

It is crucial that all stakeholders—academia, researchers, and cutting-edge startups—collaborate through an integrated process leveraging:
Ontologies
Telecommunications networks
Big Data
Artificial Intelligence
Anchor initiative: The Madrid City Council and IoTMADLab.es partnership serves as the seed for fostering private-public collaborations that improve citizen quality of life, welfare, and public service efficiency.

4. Enable Knowledge Transfer to Traditional Service Providers 

Companies traditionally providing city services require organised knowledge transfer. Municipal organisations must:
Absorb high-volume, high-quality data
Transform operating procedures to manage by results rather than efforts
Treat data quality and availability as critical assets   

5. Scale Through Smart Urban Spaces

The City of Madrid's "smart urban spaces"—areas with intensive IoT deployment across multiple verticals—provide:
Experimentation zones for municipal technicians, companies, and citizens
Proof of solution effectiveness
Collaborative scaling pathways with municipal departments and service contractors
Critical insight: This group develops a replicable model for multiple cities, not just Madrid's proprietary solution. Critical mass requires more than intent—it requires demonstrated scalability. Only a critical mass of cities will achieve market response to their needs. Otherwise cities will deploy what others decide to manufacture.

6. Achieve TRL 7-9 Innovation Convergence

Seek confluence of all approaches so innovation culminates in effective and efficient IoT deployment in cities (Technology Readiness Levels 7-8-9). This is not just another standard, but a selection of solutions demonstrated in real use cases.

 

Short Term Objectives

Integrate data models between lower and upper architectural layers
Transform use cases and proposals into company challenges, evolving into EU initiatives fostering interoperability when mature

 

Collaborations:

  • Share use cases and challenges across the community
  • Align objectives in collaborations and projects
  • Coordinate documentation from strategy meetings and organize teams to meet objectives
  • Build an innovation community comprising suppliers, researchers, and European cities interested in IoT for Cities

Upscaling

  • Issue challenges to companies and startups for developing interoperable, secure, efficient solutions, ensuring there is a client with interest—or multiple clients.
  • Expand solutions and facilitate early incorporation of new standards: this is a path, not a destination.
  • Maintain comprehensive, updated documentation of smart city projects across sectors: feed back to the provider.
  • Disseminate results through project presentations
  • Design systematic use-case development with replicability and scalability as core premises

Research & Innovation

  • Create consortia for EU-funded projects
  • Disseminate ongoing project results and introduce scaling solutions
  • Define an EU strategy for IoT sector integration into smart cities
  • Evolve reference architectures, develop associated ontologies, and create interoperable interfaces for information sharing and result comparison
  • Establish common activities with ongoing Horizon Europe projects

Sustainability & Citizen Impact

  • Contribute to urban sustainability goals
  • Improve citizen quality of life

Coordination with other AIOTI horizontal and even vertical groups

 

Leadership:

Chair:  Juan Jesus Munoz (City of Madrid)

Deliverables

  1. A catalog of Smart Data Models, just a targeted selection  with semantics shared with selected IPSO/OMA data objects, to address the specific use cases identified by the cities and the companies collaborating with them. In this way, the convergence of raw device data with the context required by the digital twin will make it easier to enable interoperability across domains—promoting greater portability and semantic consistency towards a digital twin—and give manufacturers advance notice of what will be needed: historical data series that are comparable over time and across services and cities, to support data-driven management.
  2. A catalog of devices compliant with that selection of data models.
  3. A methodology to convert the expert knowledge of the people in charge of cities' services into those catalogs.