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Enhancing Accessibility and Sustainability in Smart Cities and Smart Buildings: The Universal Accessibility Suite Initiative

Project description

Transforming urban accessibility and sustainability with technology

In today’s urban landscape, accessibility remains a critical issue, hindering the full participation of diverse communities in smart cities. While infrastructure upgrades are vital in making spaces more accessible, there is tremendous potential in leveraging technology to further empower these communities. In this context, the EU-funded AccesS project aims to revolutionise urban accessibility by leveraging AI, building information modelling (BIM) and geographic information system (GIS) technologies. AccesS seeks to create barrier-free environments, optimise energy use and ensure inclusive design across smart buildings and cities. This sets a new standard for accessibility and sustainability in urban development. Spanning cultural heritage sites, care facilities and public services across five European cities, AccesS embodies a collaborative effort involving 22 partners from 9 countries.

Objective

The Universal Accessibility Suite represents a groundbreaking initiative that aims to revolutionize the accessibility and inclusivity of smart buildings and smart cities. By leveraging advanced technologies and innovative solutions like AI, BIM and GIS, AccesS aims to create barrier-free environments, facilitate smooth mobility, and enable equal access to essential services and facilities. AccesS aspires to deliver innovations supporting accessible and inclusive design by providing advanced analytics for life-cycle assessments, optimizing energy, environmental, and user comfort aspects, incorporating simulation-based testing and compliance with accessibility guidelines for designing user-friendly and safe products and built environments. The project aims also to explore the relationship between comfort and energy consumption to promote sustainable practices and incorporates virtual user models and simulation environments. Furthermore, AccesS aspires to deliver innovations supporting inclusive, adaptive and sustainable operation of the built environment in order to optimize building operations in an adaptive manner depending on the needs of its users and addresses e-mobility and micro-mobility to facilitate accessible and inclusive transportation options. A particularly important aspect is the development of an Accessibility Assessment Scheme to define clear and measurable criteria, guidelines, and performance indicators for assessing accessibility. The demonstrators have been grouped under 6 case studies, focused on 3 different types of buildings/ uses (cultural heritage buildings, people care facilities, public services buildings) and in 5 different locations in 5 European Smart Cities (Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, Netherlands and Switzerland) in order to maximize impact and address numerous real-life situations. 22 partners from 9 European countries will collaborate and provide their expertise and resources within the 36 months of AccesS lifetime.

Fields of science

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

Coordinator

ETHNIKO KENTRO EREVNAS KAI TECHNOLOGIKIS ANAPTYXIS
Net EU contribution
€ 688 832,50
Address
CHARILAOU THERMI ROAD 6 KM
57001 Thermi Thessaloniki
Greece

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Region
Βόρεια Ελλάδα Κεντρική Μακεδονία Θεσσαλονίκη
Activity type
Research Organisations
Links
Total cost
No data

Participants (19)

Partners (2)