The Netherlands is known to be an early adopter and an innovation hub leading worldwide smart city projects. Like issues faced elsewhere, the smart cities projects in the nation too are faced with challenges. Problems such as structural changes in processes, sharing of responsibilities across silos (or within organisations), standardisation, regulations, privacy hamper quick development in the smart city sector.
This has promoted the announcement of the ‘Living Lab’ program focused on providing innovative solutions through collaboration between public, private, and non-profit organisations for data-driven decision making. The cities participating in the National Smart City Living Lab are are Breda, Dordrecht, Helmond, Leidschendam-Voorburg, Rijswijk, Veldhoven, and Zoetermeer.
IMAGEM is pleased to announce a strategic partnership with the National Smart City Living Labs in the Netherlands to provide innovative solutions that will ultimately improve quality of life in cities. “Almost everything has a location. It is hence logical to link geospatial technology to data sources that indicate the status of smart cities. Collaborating with IMAGEM solutions in the living lab, helps us visualise the complexity of the smart cities” says Hans Nouwens, Program Director for the National Smart City Living Lab.
IMAGEM has developed location-intelligence based solutions to monitor the effects of policies in cities and provide decision- and policymakers with information for evidence-based decision making. These solutions range from monitoring air quality, to employment and economy, infrastructure management and beyond.
“Visualising data is important to monitor the effects of policy. The advantage of using this technology is the ability of combining multi-source datasets with location intelligence for data-driven decision making by creating information for insights and knowledge. The dashboards dynamically correlate multi-source data from sensors, satellite and aerial images, to field surveys; and project them on maps. These cloud-based dashboards significantly shorten the time between making decisions and taking action.”, says Niels van de Graaf, Segment Manager – Government at IMAGEM.
Through Smart M.App technology, IMAGEM combines content, business workflows, and geoprocessing into a single application to produce powerful visualisations. The participants in the National Smart City Living Lab can leverage off-the-shelf dashboards designed specifically for Dutch cities – Smart Emission, Smart Economic Zone, Smart Reporting, Smart Roads, Smart Sewer, Smart Lighting, and Smart Charging Stations. Municipalities can also easily further customise these dashboards or simply create new ones.