European Commission Directorate-General for International Partnerships (EuropeAid HQ)

Testing and Experimentation Facility for Smart Cities and Communities

Last update: Mar 31, 2023 Last update: 31 Mar, 2023

Details

Status:Awarded
Budget:EUR 20,000,000
Award ceiling:N/A
Award floor:N/A
Sector:Urban Development, Information & Communication Technology, Architecture
Languages:English
Eligible applicants:Unrestricted / Unspecified
Eligible nationalities:EU 27, Anguilla, Aruba, Bermuda, ... See moreEU 27, Anguilla, Aruba, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Caribbean Netherlands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, French Polynesia, French Southern Territory, Greenland, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Montserrat, New Caledonia, Norway, Pitcairn, Saint Helena, St. Pierre and Miquelon, Turks and Caicos, Wallis and Futuna
Date posted:15 Feb, 2022

Attachments 1

Description

Call Updates

Aug 24, 2022 5:19:18 PM

FLASH INFORMATION ON THE CALL RESULTS (FLASH CALL INFO)

Call for proposals: Cloud Data and TEF

Call ID: DIGITAL-2022-CLOUD-AI-02

Published: 22/02/2022   Deadline: 17/05/2022

Total budget: 156.000.000 EUR

Budget per topic: 

  • DIGITAL-2022-CLOUD-AI-02-TEF-SMART EUR 20.000.000  

The Commission has now completed the evaluation of the proposals submitted to the above-mentioned call.

The results of the evaluation are as follows:

  • DIGITAL-2022-CLOUD-AI-02-TEF-SMART

Number of proposals submitted: 2

Number of inadmissible proposals: 0

Number of ineligible proposals: 0

Number of above-threshold proposals: 2

Total budget requested for above-threshold proposals: 32.067.966,31 EUR

We recently informed the applicants about the evaluation results for their proposals.

It is expected that the first grant agreements will be signed by 16.02.2023.

Please note that the number of proposals that can finally be funded will depend on the finally available budget and the formal selection by the Commission.


May 27, 2022 3:05:58 PM

Call  DIGITAL-2022-CLOUD-AI-02 closed on 17th of May 2022 at 17hrs Brussels time. A total of 22 proposals were received.

The number of proposals submitted  under each topic is as folllows:

  • DIGITAL-2022-CLOUD-AI-02-TEF-SMART - Testing and experimentation Facility for smart cities and communities - 2

Feb 22, 2022 12:00:10 AM

The submission session is now available for: DIGITAL-2022-CLOUD-AI-02-TEF-SMART(DIGITAL-SIMPLE)


Testing and experimentation Facility for smart cities and communities

TOPIC ID: DIGITAL-2022-CLOUD-AI-02-TEF-SMART

Programme: Digital Europe Programme (DIGITAL)
Work programme part: Digital Europe Work Programme 2021-2022
Call: Cloud Data and TEF (DIGITAL-2022-CLOUD-AI-02)
Work programme year: DIGITAL-2021-2022
Type of action: DIGITAL-SIMPLE DIGITAL Simple Grants
Type of MGA: DIGITAL Action Grant Budget-Based [DIGITAL-AG]
Deadline model: single-stage
Planned opening date: 22 February 2022
Deadline date: 17 May 2022 17:00:00 Brussels time

Topic description
 
ExpectedOutcome:

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.
Objective:

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.

Scope:

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

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