Smart Cities

Smart Cities is all about the specific approach – implemented in and with cities – to tackle diverse urban challenges through the development of smart and innovative solutions. It injects digital tools, services and processes to improve the city’s mobility, sustainability, public services, retail, culture and more…

Some example projects:

• SENSE - Safety Drone grid enabled by 5G (2023-2024)

The SENSE project aims to develop an innovative Drone-as-a-Service solution where emergency responders have real-time insight into emergency situations using HD and thermal video images. As soon as the emergency services receive a call, a Safety Drone can take off autonomously and fly to the scene of the disaster to take accurate images. With the use of a reliable 5G network the images are sent to the emergency centre and emergency responders.

The main objective is to create a Safety Drone grid throughout Belgium, that will help to unlock the potential of 5G. The project is an opportunity to create awareness to the general public regarding 5G, especially in emergency situations and to increase safety. With the use of AI, an extra layer of information is added to the video images, providing extra capabilities as well. IDLab will assist to increase the deployability of Drones-in-a-Box by analyzing potential revenue models.

• CoGhent - Collections of Ghent (Urban Innovative Action, 2020-2023)

CoGhent ensures we can make great strides in the short term regarding the digitization and opening-up of both museum collections and the city archive. The ambition is that this project lays the foundation for a participatory platform that can benefit all heritage organizations within the city.

• DITUR - Digital twins for upscaled retrofits (Flux50.ICON project - 2020-2023)

This project will explore the potential of advanced data and data analytics to support the renovation challenge of the existing building stock by focussing on the digital twin concept. The digital twin concept is investigated as an enabler to support informed decision making, stakeholder participation and upscaled retrofits through process efficiency, opportunity profiling and more interesting business cases. The digital twin is a virtual representation of the building stock, established based on innovative top-down and bottom-up data analysis and for the purpose of analysing, optimising and communicating upon city and portfolio climate actions plans in the built environment. The Techno-Economic team is responsible for performing a detailed cost breakdown and allocation, as well as a quantitative business model evalaution.

• Bilateral project with VIM - Governance of mobility data (bilateral project, 2015-2016)

This project tackles two core questions about big data in the mobility sector. First, it investigates how the multitude of mobility data can be handled, stored and accessed, while in a second step, the value of this data for the relevant stakeholders is quantified. You can find the final project report here

• CODAM - (IWT bilateral project, 2014-2015)

In the CoDAM project, the individual planning of different utility providers (gas, water, electricity,…), are optimally aligned to obtain one synergistic planning for all utility providers. During this transformation, the original planning and possible budget constraints are respected as much as possible.

• GreenWeCan - Green Wireless (iMinds ICON project, 2011-2013)

iMinds’ GreenWeCan project investigated the development of a ‘green’ dual wireless city network infrastructure—a wireless sensor network and a cooperative Wi-Fi access network. These support advanced communications services and aim towards a smart, sustainable city.