Today's building permit issuance is mainly a manual, document-based process. It therefore suffers from low accuracy, low transparency and low efficiency. This leads to delays and errors in planning, design and construction. Several EU countries have developed attempts to push forward the digitalisation of building permit procedures. But none of these have led to complete adoption of digital building permit processes within municipalities. The aim of CHEK is to take away barriers for municipalities to adopt digital building permit processes by developing, connecting and aligning scalable solutions for regulatory and policy context, for open standards and interoperability (geospatial and BIM), for closing knowledge gaps through education, for renewed municipal processes and for technology deployment in order to reach TRL 7. CHEK will do this by providing an innovative kit of both methodological and technical tools to digitise building permitting and automated compliance checks on building designs and renovations in European urban areas and regions. The CHEK consortium consists of a multidisciplinary team covering GIS, BIM, municipal processes and planning, data integration and standardisation. In addition, the consortium is a multisectoral mix of research&education, AEC- and software-companies, governmental institutions, and international standardisation organisations. The multisectoral and multidisciplinary consortium is essential to align and connect all aspects of digital permit processes required to meet the highly ambitious project objectives. Several partners are already collaborating in the European Network for Digital Building Permit (EUnet4DBP). The institutions in the advisory board, representing governments and municipalities of other European countries, will further assist the development, exploitation, and upscaling of results. The best practices and developed software following the logic of OpenAPI will enable replicability in any other European country.

DUET is an Innovation project designed to leverage the advanced capabilities of cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) to evolve the traditional public policy making cycle using large open data sources. The aim is to help public sector decision-making become more democratic and effective, both in the short and long term, through the development and use of Digital Twins for policy impact exploration and experimentation in entire cities and regions. These digital replicas of a cities system will (a) enhance day-to-day city management by helping city managers react quickly to real-time events through rapid experimentation of different decision impacts, and (b) ensure longer term policy decisions are more effective and trusted by enabling city managers from different units, to explore and discuss with citizens and businesses city issues in a visual, easy-to-digest way via a common view. Thanks to the 3D interface public administrations will, for the first time, more easily harness the collective intelligence of ALL policy stakeholders to tackle complex, systemic policy problems that require innovative thinking from multi-sectors to develop transformative solutions. Developed and tested in cities and Regions at different points in their digital transformation journeys – Flanders Region, Belgium, the City of Athens, Greece and City of Pilsen, Czech Republic – DUET will create the concept of Policy-Ready-Data-as-a-Service and ensure all cities across Europe will be able to create their own their own Digital Twins that address ethical considerations around data use whilst also complying with Europe’s stringent privacy and security regulations.

URBREATH vision is to develop, implement, demonstrate, validate and replicate a comprehensive, community participation and NBS-driven urban revitalisation, resilience and climate neutrality paradigm that will ultimately radically enhance the social interactions, inclusion, equitability and liveability in cities. Specifically, the aim of the URBREATH project is to implement hybrid/Natural Base Solutions putting at the heart of the decision-making process the communities within a city. Advanced techniques, particularly Local Digital Twins and AI, and social innovation will facilitate the achievement of its vision. The project will have four phases: 1. Inception, 2. Development, 3. Piloting, 4. Transition. The preliminary results of a single Phase are evaluated within the following Phase so to allow for feedback before releasing the final version. The Inception phase will define the methodology to be followed for the project development and will deliver the project functional and technical requirements. The second phase will release the URBREATH technical framework, consisting of tools to manage the whole data value chain and to support end-users to collaborate on the design and creation of NBS to be used in the city/district. It will be used to monitor and take decisions on the NBS to be implemented/deployed in the Piloting phase (evidence-based decision making), that involves 4 Front Runner Cities in 4 different climatic zones: Cluj-Napoca (RO - Continental), Leuven (BE – Atlantic), Madrid (ES – Mediterranean), and Tallin (EE – Boreal). During the Transition phase, all the information, results and lessons learnt from the previous steps will be collected and analysed to provide recommendations and foster replication activities and the uptake of project outputs at the end of its lifespan. To this aim, 5 Follower Cities are involved: Aarhus (DK), Athens (EL), Kajaani (FI), Parma (IT), Pilsen (CZ), linked to the Front Runners for climatic zone and/or dimension.

Positive clean Energy District’s (PED) are a key building block in the future energy paradigm for carbon-neutral cities and communities. With the rise of modern technology, local digital twins – the digital representations of a functional territory combining low- and high-velocity data with dynamic models – play a significant role in PED development and the scaling of it, supporting decision makers and planners in taking informed decisions towards a sustainable future. However, focusing narrowly on energy and mobility topics confined to the traditional sectors, digital twins for PEDs currently lack representation of significant aspects such as social, economic, and environmental properties, and hence, draw only part of the picture of a district or a city. Limited by data availability and lacking awareness of existing data, this shortcoming in digital twin modelling for PEDs leads to suboptimal decisions, impacting negatively ambitious efforts of sustainable development in cities and communities. This becomes even more clear when reflecting on the scalability issues across the 80.000 municipalities in the EU27: As highly complex entities, cities and communities differ in their physical, social, economic and even cultural structures, making it challenging to replicate PEDs in a trivial way across Europe. The BIPED project demonstrates how to overcome these barriers in a simple yet highly efficient manner that works everywhere by answering three key questions to push PEDs to the next level: wide deployment. Three key questions needs to be addressed to push PEDs to the next level: • How can digital twins be extended to refine a district’s profile representation, guiding PED design and demonstrators? • How can the quantitative collection of soft data support the advancement in digital twin development? • How to boost the replication potential of PED solutions for climate neutral cities with reinforced decision-makings

systEmic Standardisation apPRoach to Empower Smart citieS and cOmmunities (ESPRESSO) focuses on the development of a conceptual Smart Cities Information Framework, which consists of a Smart City platform (the so-called Smart City enterprise application) and a number of data provision and processing services to integrate data, workflows, and processes in applications relevant for Smart Cities within a common framework. To build this framework, the project will identify relevant open standards, technologies, and information models that are currently in use or in development in the various sectors. It analyzes potential issues caused by gaps and overlaps across standards developed by the various standardization organizations and provides guidelines on how to effectively solve those issues. Particular emphasize will be put on common denominators in order to eventually allow for horizontal interoperability between the various sectors of a smart city. Though horizontal interoperability is out of scope for this project, emphasizing integration reference models as a key common denominator (e.g. in the form of multi-dimensional city models) already defines essential parts of the foundation for future levels of interoperability.