IMI

The Municipal Institute of Information Technology (IMI) recently took part in the Spanish Network of Smart Cities (RECI)’s 4th Smart City Congress, held in Madrid, which brought together the municipalities in the RECI network, along with public bodies from the central government and the European Commission and all other stakeholders in this sector. The event offered a space for collaboration and for sharing the trends, best practices and challenges faced by smart cities.

The IMI participated in the round-table discussion on “Coverage and major events. Hyperconnected city. Rollout of networks at major events and new public safety networks”, explaining the rollout of improvements to the 5G mobile phone network along the coast for the America’s Cup. Taking advantage of this event, and through public-private partnerships, Barcelona City Council has addressed an shortcoming in the city and ensured good connectivity, which it seeks to maintain. In addition, a modern telecommunications network able to serve the public, companies and major events, will help position Barcelona as one of southern Europe’s tech hubs.

During the congress, the IMI also participated in the talk “Urban digital twin. Experiences in the cities of Valencia, Barcelona, Sant Feliu and Madrid”, explaining Barcelona’s model and its rollout of the digital twin project.
A use case was also presented with the B-city platform, the 15-minute city, with data from Madrid.

Digital twins are virtual representations that are used to test an object or a physical process. This cutting-edge tool has been used to check whether Barcelona meets service and facility provision requirements according to the model for 15-minute cities, through an online platform to analyse the accessibility of public facilities. This is the first result of the collaboration between the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centre Nacional de Supercomputació (BSC-CNS) and Barcelona Regional (BR), allowing for simulations of various use cases to make predictions and gauge the potential impact of applying certain projects or rolling out t certain public policies. There are plans to develop a more complex digital twin project in the next few years, with more closely interrelated data to facilitate solutions and decisions which improve people’s lives, and which can be used by any interested city.

Finally, and within the framework of Barcelona’s digital twin strategy, the session highlighted the city’s participation in the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium (EDIC on LDT) with Local Digital Twins, an instrument available to EU member states as part of the Digital Decade 2030 policy programme. The goal of this consortium is to accelerate and simplify the creation and implementation of multi-country projects in the sphere of digital twins. The IMI is the vice-chair for the working group.