Testing and Experimentation Facility for Smart Cities and Communities

Outcomes and deliverables

The Testing and Experimentation Facility for smart cities and communities is part of the strategy to bring technology from the lab to the market. The action should mobilise the necessary actors of the ecosystem, to ensure the readiness of both the supply and demand sides in the area of AI-enabled services and deliver the main elements needed to scale up the adoption of AI-based services by EU cities and communities. The action will result in one facility to be deployed for an extended period of time to be used in pilots, testing, experimentation, as well as for sandboxing and to support standardisation and the implementation of the AI regulatory framework.^[1]

Expected outcomes include increased and faster integration of various AI and robotics systems in smart cities and communities, which will contribute to environmental goals such as carbon neutrality, increased robustness, security, and agility of smart community infrastructure, further increases in efficiency, as well as increased competitiveness of service providers in these communities.

Technological benefits will include validation in real conditions of next-generation AI-powered robotics and AI-based automation, decision-support and decision-making tools, benefitting from large-scale data access, sharing and integration, bringing them to a higher technology readiness level, as well as increased competitiveness of European developers of AI solutions, in particular SMEs, through the support provided by the TEF, to bring their products to market.

Contribution to AI innovation:

• Boosting the competitiveness of the European industry, including SMEs in AI, a technology of high strategic relevance;
• Contributing to boost European IP and products based on European technology;
• Creation of world-class experimentation facilities in Europe, offering a comprehensive support combining the necessary expertise, meeting the needs of European innovators. The organisations running the TEFs and their process will ensure the highest level of trust and security for the users of the TEFs, and highest quality of the testing and validation to guarantee trust and security in the tested solutions, key for their broad diffusion;
• Contributing to European technology sovereignty and open strategic autonomy in AI, and AI-enabled solutions;
• Contributing to the implementation of the New European Bauhaus^[2] initiative.

To provide a testing and experimentation facility for AI and robotics in cities and communities and make their resources accessible to EU cities, communities and innovative academia and industry stakeholders (including SMEs) that would enable them to validate novel AI-driven services in close-to-real-life environments before their further massive deployment.

The Testing and Experimentation Facility will actively collaborate with the project validating the blueprint for a common European data space for smart cities and communities (see section 2.2.1.2) by making any infrastructure created by the pilots widely accessible on a longer-term basis to other stakeholders in line with the Testing and Experimentation Facility context.

As described in the Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence^[3] and in the White Paper on Artificial Intelligence^[4], technology infrastructure is needed to ensure specific expertise and experience of testing mature technology in the smart cities and communities sector, under real or close to real conditions. The Testing and Experimentation Facility may combine European, national and private investments.

The participating communities and cities will create and make physical and digital facilities for testing and experimentation of innovative AI-enabled and robotics-based services and solutions (such as optimisation of traffic flows) widely accessible on a longer-term basis to other stakeholders (and particularly the consortium running the validation pilots below) in close-to-real-life environment. The TEF will offer digital twins of some of the use-case environments, exploiting to the extent possible the LDT (local digital twin) toolbox and, vice-versa, contributing to the LDT toolbox, to the extent possible.

Within the context of smart cities and communities, this facility will be focused on the transport, energy, -construction and environmental protection sectors linked to the action areas of the European Green Deal, and support cross-sector services and applications. The facility will offer both the infrastructure and personnel support to the users of the facility to run the tests and experiments, including access to high-performance computing.

The TEF could also be used for validation and demonstration of AI-based automation and robotisation of physical and administrative processes (such as automated city transport, automated waste collection, inspection and maintenance of infrastructures, etc.), decision-support and decision-making tools; business development; standardisation; certification of products (e.g. for compliance to the MIMPlus specifications), solutions and services; and, compliance to ethical, cybersecurity and data protection norms, as well as to advance through experimentation and sandboxing the EU regulatory framework for AI and robotics.

The project is encouraged to collaborate with other relevant Digital Europe Programme projects, in particular the edge AI and other sectorial Testing and Experimentation Facilities, to ensure appropriate synergies.

[1]COM(2021) 206 final

[2]https://europa.eu/new-european-bauhaus/index_en

[3]COM(2018) 795 final

[4]COM(2020) 65 final