Sustainability is pivotal in the urban transformation strategy in order to reach more resource-efficient, resilient and smarter cities. The goal of being a sustainable city should drive the decisions for city interventions, and measuring city progress is a key step for this process. There are many initiatives aiming at defining indicators and assessment procedures, but there is no convergence in the definition of terms and application methodologies, making their real implementation complex. Within mySMARTLife project (GA#731297), a KPI-driven evaluation framework has been defined with the aim of covering the multiple pillars of a smart and sustainable city (i.e., environment, energy, mobility, ICT, citizens, economy, governance) in a holistic way. This methodology also defines the concepts and terms to guide urban planners and/or experts at the time of implementing the framework for any specific city. The evaluation framework has been deployed in the cities of Nantes, Hamburg and Helsinki, and some lessons have been learned, such as the necessity of providing a definition of measurement boundary to avoid biased interpretations. Due to a co-creation strategy, the main issues from the cities have been taken into consideration in order to increase the replicability of the results.

The current cities’ urban challenges go through digitalization and integration of new technologies under the perspective of actual and future ecological, as well as socio-economic commitments. This process is translated into the Open Standardized Urban Data Platform, which plays a pivotal role. Within its main functionalities, data ingestion, analytics and services as vertical domains become necessary to create more environmentally friendly cities. However, there still exist some deficits. Among them, openness and interoperability are outlined. On the one hand, there is a lack of open data initiatives for increasing the smart services stock. On the other hand, interoperability depends upon vendors and integrators, reducing the possibilities of Smart City growth. In this context, under the mySMARTLife project (GA #731297) umbrella, an Open Specifications Framework has been developed in order to address four main issues: (1) data interoperability; (2) services or verticals interoperability; (3) openness; and (4) replicability. It enlightens the implementation and integration of multiple city domains (like infrastructures, mobility, energy, buildings) for smart management and big-data analytics. Its applicability is demonstrated in the three lighthouse cities of the project, Nantes (France), Hamburg (Germany) and Helsinki (Finland).

Self-inspection of buildings is the process of controlling the quality of construction work in order to ensure that the specifications are implemented according to the design. Under current practices, self-inspection is totally dependent on the operator’s skills, being a process that can be time-consuming and sometimes difficult to achieve. The Intuitive Self-Inspection Techniques using Augmented Reality (INSITER; for construction, refurbishment and maintenance of energy-efficient buildings made of prefabricated components) project aims to develop a software tool to support construction workers in self-inspection processes, with the overall objective of reducing major errors and extra costs. Nevertheless, one of the challenges is the lack of interoperability between the various equipment used to carry out self-inspection. Devices and current tools deployed on-site do not speak the same language, which leads to a lack of communication. Therefore, this paper presents a framework under which the equipment would be able to send information in a common format. For this purpose, the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) de-facto standard has been established as a viable data model to represent all the information related to the building project. Along these lines, Building Information Modeling (BIM) information and IFC-compliant databases have been designed for the representation of data coming from Computer-Aided Design (CAD) modeling, laser scanning, thermography and sensor networks. Besides the IFC-data repositories, the framework is a multi-layer architecture with the goal of ensuring interoperability and promoting the stakeholders’ objectives for self-inspection during the entire construction process.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) offer immense potential to improve the energetic performance of buildings. Additionally, common building control systems are typically based on simple decision-making tools, which possess the ability to obtain controllable parameters for indoor temperatures. Nevertheless, the accuracy of such common building control systems is improvable with the integration of advanced decision-making techniques embedded into software and energy management tools. This paper presents the design of a building energy management system (BEMS), which is currently under development, and that makes use of artificial intelligence for the automated decision-making process required for optimal comfort of occupants and utilization of renewables for achieving energy-efficiency in buildings. The research falls under the scope of the H2020 project BREASER which implements fuzzy logic with the aim of governing the energy resources of a school in Turkey, which has been renovated with a ventilated façade with integrated renewable energy sources (RES). The BRESAER BEMS includes prediction techniques that increase the accuracy of common BEMS tools, and subsequent energy savings, while ensuring the indoor thermal comfort of the building occupants. In particular, weather forecast and simulation strategies are integrated into the functionalities of the overall system. By collecting the aforementioned information, the BEMS makes decisions according to a well-established selection of key performance indicators (KPIs) with the objective of providing a quantitative comparable value to determine new actuation parameters.

Cities in the 21st century play a major role in the sustainability and climate impact reduction challenges set by the European agenda. As the population of cities grows and their environmental impact becomes more evident, the European strategy aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—the main cause of climate change. Measures to reduce the impact of climate change include reducing energy consumption, improving mobility, harnessing resources and renewable energies, integrating nature-based solutions and efficiently managing infrastructure. The monitoring and control of all this activity is essential for its proper functioning. In this context, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays a key role in the digitisation, monitoring, and managing of these different verticals. Urban data platforms support cities on extracting Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in their efforts to make better decisions. Cities must be transformed by applying efficient urban planning measures and taking into account not only technological aspects, but also by applying a holistic vision in building solutions where citizens are at the centre. In addition, standardisation of platforms where applications are integrated as one is necessary. This requires interoperability between different verticals. This article presents the information platform developed for the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz in Spain. The platform is based on the UNE 178104 standard to provide a holistic architecture that integrates information from the different urban planning measures implemented in the city. The platform was constructed in the context of the SmartEnCity project following the urban transformation strategy established by the city. The article presents the value-added solutions implemented in the platform. These solutions have been developed by applying co-creation techniques in which stakeholders have been involved throughout the process. The platform proposes a step forward towards standardization, harmonises the integration of data from multiple vertical, provides interoperability between services, and simplifies scalability and replicability due to its microservice architecture.