As we enter 2016, the world is facing a number of critical challenges such as global warming, economic crisis, security threats, inequality, natural disasters and ageing society. Urban areas are particularly affected, given that the world population is increasingly concentrated in those areas. ICT solutions have the potential to change the world and improve the quality of life and security of its citizens. In particular, IoT, cloud and big data are today’s key enablers for increasing the efficiency in using shared urban infrastructure, economic and natural resources. The overall concept of the BigClouT project is to give an analytic mind to the city by creating distributed intelligence that can be implanted in the whole city network. The unprecedented number of connected things and the associated big data naturally raise new technical challenges in terms of interoperability, scalable and online data processing, actionable knowledge extraction, self-management, security and privacy. The BigClouT project is bringing together resources and knowledge necessary from prestigious European and Japanese institutions for tackling those challenges. BigClouT will leverage the results of the ClouT project and bring them several steps further and add, in particular, distributed intelligence with edge computing principles, big data analytics capability and self-awareness property. The BigClouT platform will be deployed and validated in 4 pilot cities in the project, Grenoble, Bristol, Tsukuba and Fujisawa. BigClouT gives a particular importance to the involvement of citizens during the whole lifetime of the project, from use case definitions to validation. BigClouT has also the ambitious objective of creating a community of external end-users to build their own applications/business on top of BigClouT tools and platform, and to maintain alive this community during the project and beyond, which will ensure the sustainability of the results of the ClouT and BigClouT projects.

The objective of REPLICATE is to demonstrate Smart City technologies in energy, transport and ICT in districts in San Sebastia, Florence and Bristol addressing urban complexity and generate replication plans in other districts and in follower cities of Essen, Nilufer and Lausanne. Main challenges for cities are to increase the overall energy efficiency, to exploit better local resources in terms of energy supply and demand side measures. For successful implementation of Smart City technologies two main elements are considered: - Cities are the customer: considering local specificities in integrated urban plans and the need to develop monitoring systems to extract conclusions for replication. - Solutions must be replicable, interoperable and scalable. REPLICATE considers also the complexity of cities, the tangible benefits for citizens, the financial mechanisms and the new business models. The 3 pillars implemented in the pilots with the engagement of citizens, private actors and authorities are: - Low energy districts: cost-effective retrofitting, new constructive techniques with optimal energy behaviour and high enthalpy RES in residential buildings. Include also efficient measures in public and residential buildings: ICT tools, PV, shading or natural ventilation; district heating is demonstrated hybridising local biomass, recovered heat and natural gas. - Integrated Infrastructure: deployment of ICT architecture, from internet of things to applications, to integrate the solutions in different areas. Smart Grids on electricity distribution network to address the new challenges, connecting all users: consumers, producers, aggregators and municipality. Intelligent lighting will allow automated regulation of the amount of light and integration of IP services via PLC. - Urban mobility: sustainable and smart urban bus service, electric urban bike transport, 3-wheeler delivery and transport services, deployment of EV charging infrastructures and ICT tools.