PCP focuses on radical innovation and is meant for services, tools or products that are not yet on or close to market.
In this PCP, competing companies and developers werewill be given the opportunity to come up with innovative ideas for new digital-based solutions, built on AI and related key enabling technologies including 5G, IoT, Cloud computing and big data applications, with the goal of helping Cities become carbon-neutral.
All the Buyers Group cities havehas set targets to become carbon neutral by 2050 at latest and the most ambitious is Copenhagen which wants to achieve it already by 2025. Average 82% of CO2 emissions in the western European cities comes from energy and transportation. The cities piloted multiple AI4Cities solutions within the different maturity levelslevel.
The piloted solutions were selected to offer to the cities the possibility to test novel solutions with potential to help Cities fulfil their carbon neutrality goals and test the uptake of AI based tools, but which due to their nature, are not easily to be there which presented ideas that are not easy to implement directly implementable into the cities infrastructure, due to multiple barriers, such as need for training, regulatory approval, incompatibility with existing IT tools and systems like BMs, complex coordination requirements between while there are many e.g. other stakeholders, including other vendors, different public and private users, etc. involved too or can bring added value for the existing systems like BMSs. AI4Cities provided valuable results, beyond the solutions developed, both in terms of how to run such type of challenge based innovation procurement processes, as well as, the need to provide support to multiple stakeholders, particularly, user groups, and connected IT system managers. The process taught to the cities how much time or work the integration can take and who should be involved in.
Advantages of AI
The AI was seen as an essential component of all the solutions that were piloted in Phase 3. Indeed, the solutions would not have worked or would have been very different and less efficient without AI.
AI is, of course, always reliant on available data. In the piloting Phase, all solutions were able to get sufficient data to work properly. However, when scaling the solutions outside of the Buyers group cities, availability of data can be a challenge. On the other hand, two of the suppliers (Enerbrain and MarshallAI) are able to mostly avoid that challenge by also gathering their own data. Evaluators deemed that quality of the AI was adequate or good in every solution and in some cases were used for innovative purposes.
CO2 emissions estimation
Part of the One of the main objectives of the AI4Cities challenge was project was to push the market to develop come up with solutions capable of helping cities tothat lower CO2 emissions. The buyers group hired UseLess Company to help verify and validate the suppliers’ CO2 reduction methodologies and calculations during Phase 3 of the project. The UseLess company determined that each suppliers’ emission reduction and calculation methodologies were credible. The table below shows the reported emission reduction potential of each supplier, based on their pilot.
Also, UseLess concluded that tThe emissions reduction figures of different suppliers are not comparable with each other, because the scope of each pilot was different and some of thepart of the solutions have an indirect method for reducing CO2 emissions, which made in not possible to measure themis why CO2 reductions couldn’t be measured during the pilot, also due to time constrains and local weather conditions during the pilot stage. Therefore, Instead the figures presented are estimations/simulations if the solution was in use for a whole year.
