With about 290 thousand inhabitants, Gijón is the largest municipality in the autonomous community of Asturias in Spain. The City is playing a major part in trying to accelerate the shift towards more open and interoperable smart communities.
Challenges
Gijón is a very advanced destination in terms of the use of new technologies to improve governance and innovation. Within the framework strategy “Integrated City Hall – City Management”, the city aimed at designing and deploying a smart IoT network to manage and control urban devices such as public lights. The idea was to connect IoT devices for a range of applications that could not only provide valuable information to local authorities, but also to the wider community of developers, innovators, academia and other third parties through an open data platform.
Our solution
The smart city journey started in 2016 with the modernization of just over 1,000 streetlights in the city centre and the switch to LED-based devices. Gijón moved further and decided to turn the existing infrastructure into a truly smart network to better control energy consumption and increase lighting efficiency. As the basis for this, it put in place Paradox Engineering’s Smart Urban Network, which is built on the open standard 6LoWPAN, enabling the city to manage all its applications over one single network.
The whole massive project to digitalise the streetlight infrastructure started in January 2022, with the installation of over 40,000 Smart Lighting Nodes, over 6,000 motion sensors, 135 municipal buildings for Energy Management, 100 homes and 200 shops for Smart Environmental Awareness, and 16 air quality control stations. Further applications and devices will be added to the network in the coming months and years.
Gijón City Council recognized the importance of working collaboratively and brought together relevant players from the public and private sectors, universities and research centers to share knowledge and expertise and contribute to the program. It also created a Smart Cities Chair together with the University of Oviedo, a laboratory that has replicated the city’s IoT infrastructure, and established the DemoLAB, a space for the design, development and implementation of private initiatives for new products and services.
Results
The smart infrastructure is running smoothly and the city decided to take a further step for the full interoperability of its applications and devices: Gijón joined the uCIFI Alliance to help define a common Smart City data model that can be used by all IoT device makers.
The uCIFI Alliance and the Gijón City Council are working jointly to assist IoT device manufacturers with uCIFI interoperability checks on their devices in the Gijón DemoLAB space. Each manufacturer is invited to join the alliance, implement the uCIFI LwM2M-based data model and contribute to the uCIFI 6LoWPAN-compatible wireless network mesh stack, before proposing their uCIFI-compliant products to further Gijón’s tender process.
“The benefit of a data model for us will be the ability to launch new services quickly and create new application functionalities without expensive API integration or the need to move data from third-party platforms,” says Jose Antonio Rodríguez Cortés, IoT project manager. “It’s important to enable us to scale and keep pace with new ideas and requirements for visitor services. It’s fundamental to help us realize the new concept of the model of Gijón.”
