Last November, Minister of Public Works, Íñigo de la Serna, presented the Transport and Infrastructure Innovation Plan 2017-2020, whose aim is to integrate and coordinate all of the innovation activities of the companies and institutions involved in the Public Works Group. With a planned investment of 50 million euros over a period of three years, the Plan starts in February 2018 with the launch of cross-cutting initiatives and projects throughout the Group so that ‘it will function as a collaborative group working within a network’, explained the minister.

Through the Plan, the Public Works Group is taking a major step forward in line with the European Commission’s H2020 programme, a financial instrument that seeks to ensure competitiveness through research and innovation. At the national level, the Plan is part of the government’s strategy on innovation, in which the Digital Agenda for Spain and the Spanish Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation play particularly significant roles.

Thanks to the National Smart Cities Plan developed by the State Secretary for the Information Society and Digital Agenda (SESIAD) in collaboration with Ineco, Spain is a pioneer in the development of smart cities, having established a number of guidelines on platform interoperability that have become an international benchmark. The platform ecosystem proposed in the Innovation Plan follows these guidelines, ensuring that the different transport initiatives complement and can be integrated into the advances made in smart cities. The result is a common strategy based on a solid model.

The Transport and Infrastructure Innovation Plan also uses BIM (Building Information Modelling) as a cross-cutting element for all of the initiatives, given the strategic role that it needs to play in the future of Spanish innovation (see report).

A cutting-edge transport system

Transport plays a key role in the overall development of societies and their economies. The way in which people and goods move through an area largely defines its social, economic and environmental fabric, which is why actions in transport and infrastructure are a vital part of any basic strategy in the ongoing process of expansion and modernisation of societies.

For this reason, the Plan is committed to putting technology at the service of the citizen, using innovation to make advances in safety, accessibility and sustainability. These advances need to be accompanied by greater economic and social profitability through an increase in the efficiency and effectiveness of public and private investment.

The Innovation Plan is structured around four main dimensions to achieve these objectives: digitisation, Internet of the future, intermodality and energy transformation. Supported by these dimensions, the initiatives proposed in the Plan represent a great boost to the consolidation of a safer, more sustainable and accessible cutting-edge transport system, which will keep Spain at the forefront of innovation in transport.

The aim of the plan is to put technology at the service of the citizen, using innovation to make progress in safety, accessibility and sustainability, advances that need to be accompanied by greater economic and social profitability through an increase in effectiveness and efficiency in public and private investment

Four major cornerstones and 70 initiatives underway

Drafted by Ineco, the Innovation Plan included participation by the heads of Adif, Aena, ENAIRE, CRIDA, Spanish Port System and Renfe. The opinions of other institutions, such as the Spanish Rail Research Laboratory (CEDEX), Spanish Maritime Safety and Rescue Agency (SASEMAR), the Ministry of Public Works and various private entities, were also taken into account. Four strategic cornerstones have been identified in the Plan: user experience; smart platforms; smart routes; and energy efficiency and sustainability. These cornerstones are structured in turn into 22 strategic lines, which have materialised into 70 initiatives.

User Experience is aimed at personalising the offering according to user preferences, providing them with products and services on demand. To that end, the concept of ‘Mobility as a Service’ and, in general, public-private collaboration models will be promoted. Several other initiatives will focus on the elimination of barriers, with the development and implementation of new booking, payment and validation systems focused on cybersecurity and fraud reduction.

Big Data will be the technological foundation that will enable personalisation of services and improved user experience.

The second cornerstone, Smart Platforms, is designed as a cross-cutting element that provides technological support to all of the initiatives in the Innovation Plan. Through these Platforms, information is collected and processed by the companies in the Public Works Group, improving efficiency, quality and security of the services offered.

The proposed platform ecosystem covers all modes of transport and is integrated with city platforms. The application of the BIM methodology in stations, airports and ports, and the promotion of the Single European Sky will play a special role in this ecosystem, which will also consider the inclusion of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Smart Routes are aimed at the digitisation of roads and railways, with the development of a framework for the implementation of connected and autonomous vehicles. One of the fundamental aspects will be the standardisation and regulation of vehicle-vehicle and vehicle-infrastructure communications.

In addition, modelling and forecasting systems based on automatic learning and data science will be developed to enable smart transport planning and management. Dynamic traffic control, early recognition of congestion conditions on roads and dynamic driving management are some examples of the application of these developments.

The fourth cornerstone of the plan, Energy Efficiency and Sustainability, focuses on achieving transformation towards a sustainable and energy-efficient transport system in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rationalise the use of fossil fuels and facilitate the switch to new transport solutions. This line includes initiatives that promote the use of renewable energy generation systems, use of surplus energy for self-consumption or feeding back into the grid, promotion of electric vehicles and other vehicles with alternative energies in transport networks, among others. All of these measures seek to adapt transport elements and direct them towards more sustainable and effective models in order to enable Spain to position itself as a benchmark in the international sector.

Facilitating open innovation and encouraging start-up entrepreneurship through synergies with companies in the Public Works Group is also part of the initiatives of this fourth cornerstone.

The Plan aims to set up an innovative network that integrates and connects all sectors of society, encouraging investment in innovation by large companies and SMEs and actively involving universities, technology centres and entrepreneurs. Within this line, the creation of an ‘Innovation Rail Hub’ seeks to launch collaborative R&D projects that promote railway technology on an international scale.

ILLUSTRATION_JAVIER JUBERA

Experts in public transport innovation

To draft the Plan, Ineco’s Department of Cooperation and Innovation collaborated with a team of experts in innovation from the companies and institutions in the Public Works Group. Adif, Aena, ENAIRE, CRIDA, Spanish Port System and Renfe, together with other institutions such as Cedex and SASEMAR, worked with Ineco on the drafting of a common project:  “We set out a road map –says Rocío Viñas, Ineco’s deputy general director of Cooperation and Innovation– for the next three years with a strategy based on digitisation, the Internet of the future, intermodality and energy transformation.” For Rocío Viñas, analysis of the current situation of innovation projects “reflected the importance not only of sharing knowledge and creating synergies in the Public Works Group, but also of reinforcing collaboration with universities, startups and other companies, fostering and promoting our innovative culture inside and outside the EU.”

According to Javier Rodríguez Barea, Renfe’s manager of Transformation and Digital Innovation, the interesting aspect about this project is that “citizens are at the centre of the Innovation Plan, which acts a great prescriber of a new, more personalised, door-to-door mobility service in an interconnected and smart world, where technology and digitisation are put at the service of the companies in the Public Works Group in order to transform our value proposition towards society and improve user experience in our services.”

For Antonio Berrios, deputy director of Strategic Innovation at Adif, “one of the great contributions and challenges of this Innovation Plan is its cross-cutting vision within the Public Works Group, involving all companies making a technological leap to facilitate solutions that improve the capabilities of all of the modes of transport that travellers and goods units can use in their door-to-door mobility process.”

Along this same line, Juan Puertas Cabot, head of Aena’s Quality, Excellence and Innovation Division, adds that “effective innovation is always orientated towards known customers. The plan has combined the vision of the customer as a passenger on all modes of transport and as a citizen with their needs and expectations. This global vision is necessary to focus on effective innovation in global transport.” Juan Puertas points out that instead of highlighting a single initiative, he would stress the importance of including energy efficiency and sustainability as one of the main cornerstones: “It links with the whole strategy of the Plan, which puts society as a whole at the centre. I believe that a company of the future must necessarily be responsible and innovation is an essential tool to incorporate sustainability into transport processes.” In the case of Aena, within the framework of the Plan, the company is implementing the “digital transformation of the relationship with the passenger, where not only the necessary economic return is taken into account but also a focus on improvement of the passenger experience in the different steps of a customer’s journey at an airport. The firm commitment to this project has been reflected in 15 digital innovation initiatives that will be implemented during the next year.”

Thanks to ICT, transport services can be better designed and managed, addressing the real needs of citizens and interacting with them in real time and within an integrated and sustainable transport system that improves its economic and social profitability

Of the 70 initiatives, Jose Damián López, head of the Infrastructure Technology Department of the Spanish Port System, highlights the Intermodality without barriers (E3L4-2) initiative, because the project “will enable the planning and optimisation of services and infrastructures dedicated to intermodal transport, as well as simplifying administrative procedures through centralisation in the Goods Platform, providing one-stop services and monitoring the status of goods at the same time.” For José Damián López, the Plan also develops –in the field of R&D and innovation– the necessary relationships of trust between the companies in the Public Works Group, diversifying the risks and benefits associated with innovation, and increases “the value of expected results in all of the initiatives by adding to them the talent, knowledge and experience accumulated by the different organisations.”

Fernando Fernández Martín, head of ENAIRE’s European Convergence Division and responsible for the Innovation Plan, points out that it is difficult to choose from among the initiatives included in the Plan. While the Smart ATM initiative is key for ENAIRE (it addresses the evolution of the Spanish Air Traffic Management System to adapt it to the Single European Sky initiative), it would be unfair not to mention the Platform for the management of unmanned aerial vehicle traffic, because it faces the challenge posed by the arrival of unmanned aerial vehicles in our environment, on the one hand to encourage the development of new business models, while preventing this type of vehicle from posing risks for manned aircraft or citizens.

For José Miguel de Pablo, director of CRIDA⁽¹⁾, the Ministry’s Innovation Plan “will enable the promotion and consolidation of the incipient implementation of Big Data techniques at the service of ENAIRE, therefore, improving the efficiency of aerial navigation services. The computing power that is currently available and the increasing degree of maturity of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Machine Learning offer an alternative to the use of conventional techniques, allowing them to overcome their limitations.” The Plan, he adds, “opens up a new horizon of possibilities that can range from improvements in available information and reliability and streamlining of decision making to the automation of processes through the development of intelligent predictive models. And all with one sole purpose: to improve the service provided to the passenger.”

⁽¹⁾ CRIDA is the ATM R&D+innovation Reference Centre, A.I.E. formed by ENAIRE,  (66.66%), Ineco (16.67%) and the Polytechnic University  of Madrid (16.67 %).

While there are still shortcomings in the communication and dissemination of all the initiatives that have been implemented thus far and all the work that has been done to promote the application of new technologies in the improvement of the efficiency of services, and ultimately, the quality of life of citizens, we are beginning to feel the transformation of our cities. Spain is a pioneer and an international point of reference in the development of smart cities thanks to its National Smart Cities Plan. This plan is based on three fundamental pillars: standardization, governance and industry.

The standardization process is centred on the development of the industrial fabric, thanks to the concepts of reuse and interoperability of technological solutions. There are currently 20 UNE standards published within the sphere of Smart Cities, four of them recognised by the ITU as recommendations (Interoperability – ITU-T Y.SSCP, Open data – Y.ODI, Tourist Destinations – Y.STD and Development of Rural Environments – Y.SRC), and more than 20 new standards in progress. Regulatory development concerning smart cities is carried out by the Spanish Association of Standardization (UNE), specifically the Technical Committee for Spanish Standardization on Smart Cities CTN178, of which Ineco is a member. As a result, Spain has developed an important international presence thanks to the strong policy development in this area.

In regard to governance, Spain represents a unique model in the world thanks to the fact that all the agents involved have been part of the development of smart cities. From an institutional point of view, there is coordination of the five ministries with competencies associated with smart cities: Ministry of Finance and Civil Service (MINHAFP), Ministry of Public Works (MFOM), Ministry of Energy, Tourism and the Digital Agenda (MINETAD), Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Food and Environment (MAPAMA) and Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO). To represent the cities, the Spanish Network of Smart Cities (RECI), is formed of 82 cities that account for 40% of the total Spanish population. Representing the industry point of view are the AMETIC (Association of Electronics, Information and Communications Technologies, Telecommunications and Digital Content Companies), CONETIC (Spanish Confederation of Information Technology, Communications and Electronics Companies), GICI (Smart Cities Interplatform Working Group) as well as the sector representatives.

Spain is a pioneer and an international point of reference in the development of smart cities thanks to its National Smart Cities’ Plan

Finally, as far as industry is concerned, both consolidated and emerging industries are available. Additionally, in order to speed up adoption on the part of industry, subsidies for smart city initiatives were announced in 2014 (15 million Euros), 2015 (63 million Euros) and for smart islands in 2015 (30 million Euros). Thanks to our National Smart Cities Plan, innovation and development of the industrial fabric have been made possible, providing realistic technological solutions for cities.

In this area, Ineco works with the Secretary of State for the Information Society and Digital Agenda (SESIAD) at the heart of the National Smart Cities’ Plan through the coordination of public and private initiatives of smart cities and their modelling and dissemination at national and international levels, contributing its extensive experience in the field of smart cities through an expert team of consultants in information technologies and ‘smart products’. In recent years, technological solutions have been implemented for different verticals, especially for the internal management systems of town halls, which often work behind the scenes without citizens being aware them. A vertical could be described as a technological solution aimed at a specific service in a city, such as the management of lighting. These solutions have traditionally been responsible for the control and monitoring of the associated devices.

Other more modern examples include smart car park solutions or traffic optimization solutions, such as the ones developed by Ineco for the mobility vertical in the Cityneco ecosystem, energy efficiency systems, smart irrigation, or measurements of pollutant emissions in the environment vertical, management indicator dashboards, citizen portals and mobile applications for interaction with citizens in the vertical of smart government, and a large variety of products deployed in our cities.

Local intelligence serving global mobility

Our cities are beginning to develop true intelligence. Cities such as Santander, Málaga, Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona and Valladolid have made very significant progress, but it is time to make the leap to the next level and this progress will require two concepts: the vision of the city as interconnected objects and interoperability of the city’s different platforms.

Up to this point, cities have been viewed from the perspective of the services that city councils provided to the citizens. For this reason, the solutions that have been developed have focused on improving the efficiency of these services. But as the development of smart cities has evolved, it has been noted that urban environments have a number of elements that have their own entity, with their own characteristics and needs, and which, though they are not services that constitute a management vertical, do need to be integrated into the brain of the city that is the city platform.

Some examples are the stations, airports, ports and the smart buildings themselves. These elements have a high level of automation and are becoming increasingly intelligent thanks to the intensive use of ICT, but it is necessary to avoid their isolation within the city.

INECO AT THE SMART CITY EXPO WORLD CONGRESS. Ineco’s IT team at the Smart City Expo World Congress/16 in Barcelona. From left to right: Francisco Javier Carvajal, Eloy Cámara, Ignacio Martínez, deputy director of IT, and Jesús Vázquez, alongside them, Ana Olmeda and Natalia Díaz, Knowledge Management manager.

Smart Buildings

Buildings are the main elements of the city and as such, they represent one of the greatest assets of smart cities. In addition to the increasing automation of the internal operation of buildings, work is also being done with the aim of turning them into some of the most important sensors in the city. Buildings have a lot of valuable information that can contribute to both the city and other buildings in terms of energy consumption, as well as alarms in the field of security, environment or sustainability.

Spain is committed to this comprehensive vision and already has a UNE standard for smart buildings. Also, work is being carried out with the industry to define a device to allow all the relevant information to be collected and transmitted to the city in a comprehensive manner.

Smart stations and airports

Analysing smart stations in a similar manner to buildings, we find that they must manage their facilities properly in regard to maintenance and security, as well as in regard to their commercial aspects, exploiting the characteristics of digital marketing and providing travellers with a user experience that makes them feel unique. But communication between the station and the city is essential in order to exchange the information that they both need.

Stations, like ports and airports, constitute a point of entry and, in that sense, are the traveller’s first point of contact with the city. For this reason, they must provide relevant information about the city, so that it can optimize its resources and services in different areas: public transport, mobility, security or tourism.

Cityneco predicts future traffic conditions facilitating optimization of mobility parameters virtually in real time

The use of information by the city, which is aggregated in order to avoid privacy issues, such as the number of travellers expected within a certain time range, can be made available to private agents through a city’s Open Data portals, allowing the development of new business models that improve the range services offered to users, for example, in the tourism sector.

Smart ports

In the case of the analysis of the ports, and to provide a more comprehensive view, we will focus our comments on the area of freight transport. In addition to being the point of arrival of travellers, ports constitute a point of entry of goods to the city. The predicted information regarding the arrival of these goods, as well as their characteristics, is of great value, allowing the city to adapt, taking into account logistical and security aspects based on the volume and types of goods.

The importance of interoperability

All the objectives discussed so far for the elements of cities would be impossible without city platforms. It is in these platforms where the magic of transforming information into knowledge takes place. They allow information to be exchanged between the different services of a city and this combination generates significant added value.

We understand interoperability in different ways. First, cities must be able to evolve and change their platforms over time, if they want to, without affecting the other elements involved. Furthermore, this change may be a comprehensive change of the entire platform or may affect only one part of it.

The second concept of interoperability is centred on the fact that different platforms must be able to communicate with each other; station and airport platforms will need to talk to the city, and the platforms in different cities will in turn also need to talk to each other to exchange information.

A Lego representation of a smart city, which manages information through the intensive use of ICTs. / PHOTO_ELVIRA VILA

The third concept of interoperability focuses on the business models that will be built on the city’s platforms. Private agents are developing new business models, such as smart parking applications or tourist destinations, and there must be some assurance that the investment made to develop a product for a city will be recovered, with the possibility of implementing the same product in other cities.

To demonstrate the high degree of interoperability of Spanish platforms, SESIAD and Ineco are working on the implementation of virtual laboratories that allow the functional validation of the different solutions developed for smart cities. These laboratories, in turn, make it possible to verify the portability of solutions between different platforms. Smart city platforms have currently been implemented in cities such as Málaga, Valencia or Barcelona, but they are not the only ones that have already taken the step.

A NEW PLATFORM. In addition to the information from the sensors, the Cityneco platform analyses information from mobile data, GPS and even social networks, which enriches the information on the mobility status in the city.

For these reasons, Spain is a pioneer in the interoperability of smart city platforms. There is a UNE interoperability standard (UNE 178104) that has been proposed as an international standard through the ITU (International Telecommunication Union). Ineco has collaborated since the early stages as a member of the subcommittee that developed the standard, through to its international deployment, providing technical support to SESIAD. Cityneco complies with this standard, so it is completely interoperable.

Regarding all of the above, we can say that the interoperability of these platforms is vital to the development of both Spanish cities and Spanish industry. It is important to remember that our platforms can be exported to other countries.

The National Platform

One thing to keep in mind is that the development of smart cities can lead to increased inequalities among cities, and one of the fundamental factors arising from this is the attraction and capturing of talent. The cities that are undergoing the greatest development in the field of smart cities are generating a pull effect on this talent, which in turn is driving innovation and development of the city itself.

The development of a national platform would allow municipalities with more limited economic capacity to enjoy the benefits of smart cities

Also, cities with more limited resources have less investment capacity and that means that they cannot access solutions that like the city platform that represent the cornerstone of innovation.

In these cases, it may make sense to develop a national platform that allows municipalities with more limited economic capacity to enjoy the benefits of smart city solutions without having to make an investment that, in most cases, is beyond their reach. This national platform would serve these municipalities, allowing savings in acquisition and maintenance costs to each municipality, allowing them to focus their investment on specific vertical solutions to improve the services they provide to their citizens.

Cityneco, a smart platform

Ineco has signed a collaboration agreement with the city of Granada to implement the Cityneco platform. / PHOTO_BÁRBARA JIMÉNEZ-ALFARO

Cityneco is the smart platform developed by Ineco to integrate the different verticals in cities.

The platform makes it possible to connect the city’s different sensors thanks to its IoT (Internet of Things) module, and in turn it can also integrate and process multiple sources of information, from social networks to video images.

• The platform is fully scalable and interoperable thanks to its layered structure, fully compliant with the standardization proposal in the standard. There is also a version that is offered in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS) that allows the development of medium-sized cities, making use of the platform without requiring the city to have its own infrastructure.
• With respect to the use of information, the platform can display dashboards based on real-time information as well as management indicators.
• Within the mobility vertical, Ineco’s solution presents highly innovative features that set it apart from the other solutions available on the market. The platform monitors traffic thanks to the information that it receives from the non-conventional traffic detectors and sensors. The platform then processes the information, taking advantage of the integration with the simulation models, as well as the use of machine learning techniques (artificial intelligence). This makes it possible to predict future traffic conditions, facilitating optimization of mobility parameters virtually in real time. On the other hand, together with the information from the sensors, the platform’s features allow information from mobile data, GPS and even social networks to be analysed, enriching the information on the status of mobility in the city.
• Ineco has signed a collaboration agreement with the city of Granada and is in the process of implementing the Cityneco platform, in order to allow the city to test the capabilities of the Ineco smart platform as well as the mobility vertical.