Solutions on BABLE are expert-curated proposals for efficiently implementable Smart City projects. Each Solution contains a list of benefits and a list of functions needed to achieve these benefits, as well as information on the business model, driving factors, relevant legal regulations, advices from experts and links to relevant use-cases and products.
Solutions
Solution

Smart Parking
A Smart Parking System makes use of sensors or other technologies to determine the availability of parking lots in cities. This information can be shared with drivers, reducing the time spent on looking for parking, and thus reducing traffic congestion. Additionally, municipalities can get precise and updated information about the traffic situation, allowing them to align parking tariffs with transportation goals. The system can also let the customer pay and reserve a parking lot, guiding them to free spots, and even park the customer's car for them.
Solution

Urban Air Quality Platform
Each day everyone breaths in and out approximately 20,000 times – at the same time industries, combustion engines and chimneys constantly pollute our air. An urban air quality platform is an air-quality-sensing network, which allows citizens to access hyperlocal data about local emissions, such as ozone, particulate matter, nitric oxides, carbon monoxide and ammonia. Moreover, data on air quality, on the weather or traffic can be also added. The sensors collecting the data can be installed either by an operator, e.g. the municipality or on private property. Citizens’ participation in the implementation process allows a faster and agiler project development cycle. To inform citizens about the local urban air pollution a platform as well additional notifications are possible. Additional suggestions on behavioural changes can enable the citizens to lessen their own impact on the urban air pollutants. The mandatory and additional functions of the system are shown below. The impact of it varies depending on the functions implemented. Regarding the benefits of the solution, this is evident. The benefits, which can be achieved by a system containing all additional functions below, are shown as potential benefits whereas the general benefits can be reached by implementing the mandatory functions only.
Solution

Urban Emergency Service
The city infrastructure must be able to respond to various challenges including catastrophic events, natural disasters, terrors attacks and further cases of emergencies. For that purpose, an integrated emergency handling system is required that can close the gap between emergency centres and the citizens. On the one hand, this system should be able to acquire information from and around citizens based, for instance, on social networks or various sensors distributed in the vicinity in question. On the other hand, the system can provide means for pushing notifications and relevant information to citizens that are potentially in danger.
Solution

Intelligent and Connected Public Space
An intelligent and connected public space collects data in public areas and displays or reacts on the data. The data can be securely transferred via Wi-Fi or other similar technologies to be, i.e. combined with a central system. The data that is collected with sensors can be data on the air quality, the movements and people in the public space or safety relevant information. With this, particular importance should be paid to privacy rights, i.e. by using non-intrusive sensors. Often implemented sub-services are Wi-Fi-hotspots or guidance beacons for blind navigation. Public displays can i.e. provide access to local maps, a store and service registry or multimodal route-planning. These mandatory and additional functions of the intelligent and connected public space are shown below. The sensors and technologies used to realise the different functionalities can be attached to, i.e. Smart Lighting poles and make use of the underlying backbone infrastructure.
Solution

Smart Home Video Communication
Especially in less densely populated areas or for less mobile people a video conference system can ease the access to lots of services, such as medical advice, education, government services or judiciary. All these services can be used without leaving the house when a smart home video communication system is successfully implemented. Possible advantages of a video conference system are: The use of video enables authentication of the participating parties, people with disabilities can more readily access public services, long waiting queues in public buildings are avoided, and more comprehensive care than via telephone can be provided. Once installed, this system may also be used for educational purposes, to communicate with family or to enable surveillance of one’s property.
Solution

Urban Data Platform
Urban data platforms build the basis for a multitude of applications in a Smart City. An urban data platform intends to map, store and integrate data from different stakeholders of the Smart City ecosystem (public entities, businesses, citizens and organisations). The data can be offered to other service providers, can be analysed or visualised and published. Such an urban data platform can be the basis for a lot of smart city solutions as it offers a secure, stable and flexible base for data-driven solutions. An urban data platform can constitute a holistic system, connecting various services around a city by bringing all data together. A multisided-market approach can support smart and medium enterprises (SMEs) as data is available without any high initial investments, include public services and citizens. The main concern when it comes to urban data platforms is data security and transparency, which places special focus on the responsibility and the reliability of the operator of the platform. A broadly accepted approach is, therefore, the operation by a municipal organisation.
Solution

Smart Lighting
Smart streetlights enable the reduction of running expenses associated with public lighting by delivering several value-added services to cities and citizens. The solution allows the dynamic adaption of the brightness of streetlights according to the season-dependent day and night cycle duration or even to a combination of this and the noise level. A good lighting system increases both actual and perceived security. Furthermore, directed light may improve the well-being of residents. An underlying connectivity backbone connects the poles (i.e. fibre-optic backbone) and serves to deliver digital services via integrated street lights. Within this solution, the lighting poles can be used to provide other functionalities (i.e. Intelligent and Connected Public Space – Wi-Fi, navigation aids for visually impaired people or displays) through the attachment of additional sensors or signalling devices.
Solution

Last Mile Delivery
Due to the growing share of on-line shopping nowadays, an additional sales channel for companies came up. Internet sales has become an essential part of the retailing business in the past years. Consequently, the volume of traffic caused by delivery services has increased rapidly with the success of e-commerce. Likewise, the delivery market slowly transforms from a mainly B2B market to a B2C one (e.g. Drone delivery). The final track of the supply chain – home delivery to a customer – is called “Last Mile”. The “Last-Mile” of a delivery poses significant logisticalcal challenges, especially regarding the increasing customer expectations, such as "same day delivery" or "exact time delivery" which leads to the decreasing time available for planning. Furthermore, the “Last mile” has a huge effect in traffic of commercial vehicles in cities. The Last Mile Delivery (LMD) accounts for a major part of the costs involved in a delivery. A research of Capgemini Research Institute showed that the costs of LMD account 41 % of the overall supply chain costs ( Jacobs, Warner et al., p. 20 ). Figure 1 - Distribution of overall supply chain costs ( Jacobs, Warner et al., p. 20 ) In the reality of LMD, challenges like a small or single order compared to deliveries to stores, many constantly changing geographically dispersed locations (compare deliveries to stores) etc. must be faced. The goal is to improve the efficiency of LMD, to minimize costs incurred, improve safety to minimize the impact on traffic as well as minimize the environmental impact. To improve the quality of life in the affected areas, the LMD should become environmentally friendly and emission-free (noise and emissions), the volume of traffic should be reduced to prevent illegal parking, collisions and stressful congestions. Congestion, air quality, collisions and illegal parking are all ills affecting the quality of life of citizens. The accessibility of inner-city locations is becoming more and more limited for cars and trucks in contrast delivery services are growing especially in these dense inner-city areas. There are several solutions to solve these problems that reduce pollutant emissions, lower the impact on traffic, improve safety and make LMD more efficient.