Indra designs integral strategic plan to consolidate Gijón as a Smart City

Gijón City Council (Asturias-Spain) has laid the foundations to set out the city's technology model allowing it to join the select group of smart cities. Indra, the consultancy and technology multinational, has finalised the first stage of the integral strategic plan which will set out the priority areas to cover in the near future in order to develop "smart" services in the Asturian city based on an assessment of the current situation.

The Gijón Smart City Strategic Plan was presented today to the city's mayor, Carmen Moriyón, and the Regional Government and includes the following as fundamental action areas: reducing the city's energy requirements, increasing the public's digital integration for administrative procedures and coordinating municipal activity amongst areas of government.

The short- to medium-term proposals include creating a comprehensive inventory of the city's assets (traffic, waste, lighting, parks, buildings...), geo-referenced on a single GIS platform enabling dynamic, interconnected and comprehensive management with the municipal management system. In addition, action has already been taken aimed at promoting the Citizen Card as a connection point for different "Smart City" programmes, improving energy efficiency in municipal buildings and releasing information as "Open Data". This last point means making Council information available to all stakeholders so that they can use it to create services and develop applications that supplement what is offered by Local Government.

All smart services will be coordinated on a city platform in the medium- to long-term. The urban platform is an essential element to a smart city since it comprises resources, systems and services, and is, in short, able to orchestrate the actions to be taken: it receives information and enables services.

Promoting the Citizen Card

The assessment's conclusions highlight the key role of the Citizen Card to act as a dynamic element and link for future "Smart City" programmes. Gijón has 281,772 inhabitants and there are currently over 240,000 cards with contactless technology in Gijón used to access nearly all municipal services such as public transport, public bike hire, swimming pools, libraries, parking and identification for electronic services, amongst others. Its flexible scalable design, wide public acceptance and the culture of coordination and integration it has created between different city government departments provide major advantages to drive the introduction of new "smart" services.

A highlight amongst the main initiatives proposed for boosting its presence is its use in mobile support via NFC technology or driving new functionalities beyond the public sphere, incorporating private initiatives for both external (shops, payments in taxis) and internal use (access at companies, recording entries and exits...). Another important point is developing its use amongst local businesses so as to speed up processes (permit applications, registrations/cancellations, invoices or case files) and boost competitiveness.

City Council experts have already started work on detailing the functional and technical requirements for services and the organisational model needed.

The Gijón Smart City Strategic Plan includes outlines on the opportunities and benefits the development of smart services offer to a city such as Gijón to improve the public's quality of life more effectively and sustainably, achieve greater efficiency in the use of public resources and strengthen public participation and use of the city.

Integral solution for smart cities

Indra's extensive experience in providing technology services in cities enables it to offer a comprehensive integrated solution for smart cities that has been successfully introduced in many locations around the world. To develop a smart city, Indra takes a strategic plan produced in tandem with each city as a basis which also includes technological, organisational, service provision and public participation aspects. The design of the specific strategic plans for Sant Cugat and Lleida stand out in this area.

The company's most recent solutions include Atenea, the Inter-operability Urban Platform (UOIP) to integrate and manage all services and solutions comprising the ecosystem in cities of the future. In addition, Indra has a Smart Cart prototype, a contactless smart card based on RFID technology enabling single integrated access to all Smart City services that require payment, identification and access control.

The company has rolled out major benchmark projects such as the CISEM (Integrated Security and Emergency Centre of Madrid) or the CUCC (Single Emergency Coordination and Control Centre) in Buenos Aires which cover security and emergency plans in cities. It also has specific solutions for intelligent urban public transport and traffic management and has benchmark projects in Spain, Colombia China, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru. Spanish cities include Pamplona (with 170 cameras and monitoring, an emergency priority system, access control bollards and infrastructure improvement) and Torrejón de Ardoz (40 traffic and security cameras, traffic light regulation, location and monitoring of the police vehicle fleet and incident response).

The following are highlights in the area of smart grids and energy efficiency: the design of the intelligent network plan for Peru, the 3E-Houses project for efficient energy management in public housing, the SPEED system (Smart Platform for Efficient Energy Distribution) introduced into the Madrid network enabling improved medium voltage network management, a distributed generation service and demand response analysis, and Zigamit aimed at providing added value services to households via intelligent networks. The "end to end" recharging solution for electric vehicles and the intelligent systems for managing electricity businesses being introduced at companies in Spain and Latin America also stand out.

In turn, Indra holds the top spot in digital health in Spain exporting its skills to countries such as Bahrain (via the I-SEHA system covering 1.2 million people), Chile, the Philippines and Morocco.

Indra

Indra is the leading Spanish multinational consulting and technology firm and one of the main players in Europe and Latin America. Innovation is the cornerstone of its business and sustainability, having allocated €550M to R&D&i in the last three years, making it one of the leading companies in Europe in its sector in terms of investment. With sales approaching €3bn, 55% of its income is from the international market. The company employs 42,000 professionals and has customers in 118 countries.