Internet of Everything is recognised to be one of the dominant ways transforming the way we manage and live in our urban environments in the future. The extension of the Internet to the physical spaces and objects is a massive opportunity for new services and business for example in the areas of logistics, transport, environment, security and wellbeing. Internet of everything is directly linked to the smart city development, but it has proceeded slower than expected. The key showstoppers are the lack of common standards, fragmented marketplace, and lack of ways to systematically test and introduce new solutions in the cities. The common challenge of the SELECT for Cities PCP is the design, research and development of “cities as linked and large-scale Internet of Everything labs”. The challenge lies in developing an open, standardized, data-driven, service-oriented and user-centric platform that enables large-scale co-creation, testing and validation of urban IoE applications and services. This approach fosters the longer-term goal of evidence-based innovation in cities. The envisaged platform has several requirements, components & features that are currently not available in existing solutions. The platform must allow collaboration between departments and cities, and (automated) testing of IoE services. The design should be based on an open and modular approach, and support cloud-based, data-driven, service-oriented, user-centric, and co-created large-scale testing. The joint effort of the partners procuring this pre-commercial track lies in guarding the integration capabilities of the platform with solutions that exist in the respective cities today. Particular attention will thus need to be paid to technologies and tools that allow smooth communication and integration between these existing solutions. The end goal of SELECT for Cities is taking the idea of the city as a large Internet of Everything Lab and putting it into practice.

The ever increasing demand for implementation of sustainable and innovative transportation solution in order to reach the cities service goals, dictates the need for more advance methods of procurement to address key parameters such as innovation, scalability, interoperability etc. Therefore, there is a strong need to establish a domain for understanding the public buyers’ needs and the market perspectives in this matter. SPICE will give an invaluable chance to public authorities to share their experiences of procurement of innovative sustainable transportation solutions and to learn from each other. Over a 24 month timeframe, this project will enable public procurers to form a stakeholder group. This project will gather the best practices in procurement of innovative sustainable transport and mobility solutions in three hierarchical levels; national, regional and city levels by engaging with leading European cities and regions, industry and academic institutions to facilitate sharing of their best practices and demonstration of using public procurements for innovative solutions using various instruments: PCP, public-private-innovation partnerships, market consultation, award criteria, etc. It will carry out in-depth analyses on current practices, to look into various possibilities to enable fast adoption of new technologies,and to define strategies of procurement approaches and award criteria stimulating innovation, thus forming a set of recommendations. This will assist public authorities to use this collection of best practices in a more constructive and simple manner and implement the recommendations through capacity building and knowledge transfer activities. Finally, using the project as platform, SPICE will form a number of buyers groups to work on strategies on how to plan joint, cross-border, procurement actions for their sustainable transportation projects,and–if possible– to commence planning of such actions during the timeframe of the SPICE project.

The BuyZET project will develop innovative procurement plans to help the participating cities achieve their goals of zero emission urban delivery of goods and services. The core cities in the project - Rotterdam, Oslo and Copenhagen - will first identify which goods and service procurement areas have the highest "transportation footprint" - i.e. the number of motorised vehicle trips to transport goods and people generated in delivering the goods or services, and the related emissions. Based on this each city will select two procurement areas to focus on for the project. For each priority area, the cities will then: a) Instigate in-depth market consultation activities with all relevant supply chain actors to identify potential procurement pathways to achieving zero emission delivery. b) Identify and engage with other significant public and private buyers in the priority area with the aim of establishing a buyers group, launching joint or collaborative procurement actions Based on these activities, each city will prepare procurement plans, identifying specific upcoming tenders where the innovative solutions identified will be applied. The core group of cities will be joined by a group of Observer Cities, who will closely engage with project activities and be encouraged to also carry out the defined activities within or following the project period.

NAIAD aims to operationalise the insurance value of ecosystems to reduce the human and economic cost of risks associated with water (floods and drought) by developing and testing - with key insurers and municipalities - the concepts, tools, applications and instruments (business models) necessary for its mainstreaming. We will do this in detail for 8 demonstration sites (DEMOs) throughout Europe and develop tools and methods applicable and transferable across all of Europe. The assumption is that Natural Assurance Schemes can reduce risk, especially to drought and flooding, and this risk reduction can be assessed and incorporated within insurance schemes. NAIAD´s conceptual frame is based on three pillars: (i) to help build a resilience approach to risk management through nature based solutions, (ii) the operationalisation and testing of scientific methods using a source-to-sea in DEMOs, (iii) the uptake of nature based solutions that are cost-effective and provide environmental, social and economic benefits. Trans-disciplinarity and stakeholder engagement are at the core of NAIAD for two reasons: first, because the conceptual and assessment methodologies combine physical, social and cultural and economic aspects, integrated into tools and methods but second, and most importantly “road tested” and validated with the stakeholders and end users themselves at the DEMOs. NAIAD will contribute to providing a robust framework for assessing insurance value for ecosystem services by (i) enabling full operationalisation through improved understanding of ecosystem functionality and its insurance value at a broad range of scales in both urban and rural context; (ii) making explicit the links between ecosystem values and social risk perception; and (iii) the application of developed methods and tools in water management by relevant stakeholders, especially businesses, public authorities and utilities.

The C-MobILE (Accelerating C-ITS Mobility Innovation and depLoyment in Europe) vision is a fully safe & efficient road transport without casualties and serious injuries on European roads, in particular in complex urban areas and for Vulnerable Road Users. We envision a congestion-free, sustainable and economically viable mobility, minimizing the environmental impact of road transport. C-MobILE will set the basis for large scale deployment in Europe, elevating research pilot sites to deployment locations of sustainable services that are supported by local authorities, using a common approach that ensures interoperability and seamless availability of services towards acceptable end user cost and positive business case for parties in the supply chain. The C-MobILE project will produce 7 key results: - C-ITS framework defined in partnerships with major stakeholders for proposing key deployment enabling solutions on existing pilot sites, including business cases - Strategic Research Agenda defined for key researching and innovation areas that promote sustainable C-ITS deployments and will lead towards automated transport in Europe - Assessment including CBA of the cumulative real-life benefits of clustering C-ITS applications and integrating multiple transport modes in the C-ITS ecosystem - Open secure large-scale C-ITS deployment of new and existing applications demonstrated in complex urban environments interoperable across countries involving large groups of end users - Provide an open platform towards C-ITS sources to support deployment of service concepts on commodity devices, validated by developer communities - Validated operational procedures for large-scale deployment of sustainable C-ITS services in Europe - Released testing methodologies to evaluate the proven impact of C-ITS architectures and services