DESCRIPTION
UrbAlytics project aims to improve the knowledge of the territory and to activate new business processes based on smart geoinformation, especially in the field of monitoring and control of quality and evolution of urban spaces and for the activation of continuous and proactive processes to improve the quality of services to citizens. The service will be a useful support tool for urban planners, social and economic services offices and the environment/territory office, to make "evidence-based" decisions. The company, with provided datasets and services, will develop specific pilots on Barcelona to analyze:
- evolution of equality of lifeindex over a time horizon of 3/5 years
- creation of thematic urban maps for the planning of new investments
In the Real Estate sector, UrbAlytics will offer new and powerful tools to assess the evolution of the urban scenario and identify the main parameters to plan new buildings or renovation of buildings or even entire neighborhoods. Through the continuous production of information based on the fusion of data from heterogeneous sources (HR/VHR optical and SAR images, data from environmental stations/models, and above all, data provided in project datasets) UrbAlytics, thanks to the automatic and intelligent analysis algorithms, will be able to provide: indexes describing the current level of quality of life in a city.
- the analysis of the evolution of this index over time and the projection in feed-forward logic in the near future;
- an attractiveness index for the business areas
- simulation modules to analyse the future evolution of the indices produced on the basis of specific predictive algorithms.
Experiment progress
The first phase of the project saw the completion of activities to define the requirements, the possible architectural choices and the identification of artificial intelligence models for the calculation of the urban cooling index and the environmental quality of life index. In addition, the first datasets were created to be shared through the federated infrastructure and provided as input to the selected models to obtain the first results on the city of Barcelona.
Our objectives for the experiment are:
- to identify a new model for the integration of satellite data with open city data
- to use the data in a combined way to create a representative index of quality of life
- to create models for analysing this index, based on data trends and to understand its evolution
- create a model for predicting the value of the index in the future.
The strength points for the commercial success of UrbAlytics are:
- the city digital twin product is based on the integrated analysis of satellite images, in situ data and user generated content using artificial intelligence.
- simplified access non non-expert users to continuous land monitoring based on easy to understand qualitative/quantitative indexes created from the data fusion between EO derived information, in situ data and web/social crowdsourced insights;
- combined use of data from different satellites;
- access to multiple EO service providers based on constellations of small satellites (e.g. Planet Labs, Iceye, HawkEye etc.) to shorten revisit time and increase the information flow available to customers
- creation of an application ecosystem in which third party developers can also release (and sell) their own analysis models that use the several data sources available;
The idea will be materialized and transformed into an innovation through the integration of the Latitudo 40 platform with all datasets and services offered by for the realization of the new UrbAlytics product. The analysis carried out in the competitive scenario, also through the use of specific research and market studies, shows how a new business model is emerging related to the use of satellite data in complex geo-information systems, easy to use solution for customers, as it does not require any specific expertise in image processing nor interpretation of data. Moreover, the integrated use, in a single platform, of satellite images, in situ data allows to have the maximum information potential from the phenomena that characterize a territory, offering new information and analysis tools based on a huge amount of data that individually offer only a partial representation of the phenomenon. This will allow a deep analysis of the data collected in the multi-source data lake not only for understanding and monitoring the selected areas, but also for prediction and forecast of how the area will evolve in the future with the creation of a “digital twin” of the urban area.
Latitudo's Urbalytics solution40 can offer some interesting non-economic benefits for the development of sustainable and resilient cities. Firstly, the use of data can provide information on where to invest to improve citizens' quality of life and the attractiveness of management, with a better use of public resources. This will lead to more inclusive cities, where even the suburbs are part of investment projects to improve urban quality. Another important point is that the analysis of environmental parameters, on an ongoing basis, makes it possible to check KPIs in terms of combating climate change by analysing public green areas as a strategic resource and analysing their evolution over time, in conjunction with data on air pollution, the presence of urban heat bubbles and population distribution. All this makes it possible to understand how an Urban Data Platform could be a fundamental and indispensable tool for all cities. Latitudo40 also contributes to greater transparency with citizens, the data produced by the platform can be used in citizen portals to show the efforts of the administration and the results achieved.
Urbalytics project is integrated in the already consolidated platform of urban planning, and urban monitoring developed by Latitudo40 and represents a tool to strengthen, through the use of the services and datasets offered, its market potential at an international level, also thanks to the demonstrator that will be created using the available datasets. In summary, the KeR that will be produced are:
- Decision support platform that can be integrated with local government public dataset systems, replicating the experiment with the datasets provided
- Geospatial data representation, with an integrated view of Sentinel2 satellite data processing and local datasets
- Multi-temporal representation of the evolution of a city on specific benchmarks (urban green distribution, urban heat maps, pollution levels, population distribution)
- Construction of a representative synthetic index of the quality of urban life (quantity of public green areas, presence of services, population concentration, distance from schools and public offices, level of pollution) useful to analyse results in urban improvement projects
- Integrated platform scalable to other clients and other municipalities
Latitudo40's objective is to make all KERs available by the end of the project, in order to start an immediate commercialisation of the services.
KPI 1 – New Algorithm for Urban Analysis KPI 2 Data Provider API integration KPI 3 – Integration of Data for Urban Parameters Analysis KPI 4 – High Service Availabiliyy KPI 5 – Time to execute elaboration
