Project description
Systemic instrument designing effectively smart cities
To plan for the future of modern, complex and changing cities, decision-makers need to address multiple interdependent dynamics like demography, economy, transport, land use, energy, water and waste. Today, they rely on heavy simulation technologies lacking multisectoral coverage of city trends to support effective planning. The EU-funded ForeCast project will build on the groundbreaking ForCity’s software suite, which employs systemic, prospective models simulating potential impacts in city developments to shape sustainable smart cities. ForeCast will add to existing and validated applications (City District Heating and Cooling, Water and Geoworking): Mobility, Waste Management and Urban Planning.The aim is to achieve a fully systemic instrument to shape future city developments in investments within user friendly 4D maps and dashboards.
Objective
Public and private operators, who are developing services or infrastructures in urban areas, are confronted to growing complexity, which arises from diverse factors such as increasing urban population, new mobility trends, new consumption patterns or climate change. There is a strong need to provide these agents with decision-making support tools that continuously help them anticipate such challenges and optimise planning. ForCity’s software suite is a pioneer solution. Thanks to systemic prospective models, it simulates the impact of possible future city developments on the investments, showing the results in user-friendly 4D-maps and dashboards. It helps businesses and local authorities save millions of euros, reduce their environmental footprint and facilitate stakeholders’ collaboration, boosting the creation of sustainable Smart Cities. ForCity has already three applications in the suite, validated by clients and in use: ForCity DHC (to plan district heating and cooling networks), Water (to program drinking water networks) and Geoworking (to simulate human resources mobility policies). Three others are under development, in Mobility, Waste Management and Urban Planning. Only two companies in the world do a similar complex modelling and our solution is the only one that addresses multiple urban sectors (energy, water…), and delivers an online turnkey software. Smart City services represent a huge market (estimated at 175 bn€ in 2023) and planning tools are yet to be developed in this field, constituting a promising and lucrative segment. Since its creation in 2014, our French SME has experienced an outstanding growth (2.9 million€ turnover in 2017, 88 employees today, 20 French and International awards received) and our solution is already used in eleven cities. The present project will help us scale-up and accelerate our international expansion in our next targeted markets (Germany, UK and Hong Kong), reaching 46.5 million€ turnover and 214 employees by 2023.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologycivil engineeringurban engineeringsmart cities
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringwater treatment processesdrinking water treatment processes
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringwaste management
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuels
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
69003 LYON
France
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.