Better cities for smarter people

​The smart-city paradigm stresses the importance of the social capital possessed by every urban centre. The concept goes beyond the idea of an “intelligent city” considered simply as a “digital city”, therefore, and forges a strong interdisciplinary partnership involving public bodies and private enterprise. In this process of infrastructure renewal, new technologies are vital in enhancing the quality of public services and in significantly reducing their associated costs.

HI REPLY: THE PLATFORM FOR SMART CITIES

Using sensors distributed throughout the local area and a platform to centralise the data collected, HI Reply equips citizens, public bodies, and service providers with a personally tailored real-time view of communities’ activities and the city’s needs. HI Reply implements all the security standards for controlling access to sensitive data and for applications certified via “as-a-service” models to build easy-to-implement, re-usable, open solutions in the automotive, health & care, retail and mobile-payments sectors.

Reply is actively involved in constructing smart-city scenarios as a leading technology supplier supporting public bodies and private enterprise as they progress this agenda. We offer our expertise in designing cloud infrastructure facilities, integrating and developing technology solutions based on the IoT and highly innovative applications for critical sectors from health & care to social services and from intelligent urban spaces to personal safety.

TRIALS AND PROJECTS

​Reply is involved in the following wide-ranging smart-cities projects at national level:

• PRISMA - Interoperable Cloud Platforms for Smart Government

  The PRISMA project is developing an innovative, interoperable, open cloud-computing platform for e-government services. The aim is to produce models and inventive implementations in the context of local-government processes in urban and metropolitan settings and to build a set of scalable vertical applications for “self-service” use. The main social, environmental and local-security issues are tackled through smart communities supported by different types of cloud platform that provide the required interoperability, even though they are expressly configured for various application sectors and services. The platform combines semantic technologies applied to the publishing and re-use of linked open data and to the external assessment of local-government performance within the broad theme of e-democracy.

• OPEN CITY PLATFORM (OCP) - Cloud Computing for Smart Government

  This initiative involves researching and developing new and sustainable organisational models with new standards and high-tech solutions to innovate local-government service provision, backed by scientific results. The aim is to provide services based on open, interoperable cloud-computing solutions usable on demand by citizens, businesses and other administrations. The Marche, Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna regions and 21 local councils have joined the project as experimental centres. OCP has a special focus on infomobility and video surveillance, local taxation, smart government, and health.

• OPLON - OPportunities for active and healthy LONgevity - is the platform for integrated home-care services for active-ageing communities

  The project’s main aims are to establish actions and methods to promote elderly people’s health and to ward off frailty and functional decline, by devising and developing tools and networks for early diagnosis and “care & cure”. The solutions will be aimed mainly at older people in the “risk zone”, who begin to experience limitations in performing their daily activities and who risk becoming frail. Presented by CUP 2000 in partnership with the research centres at Turin Polytechnic and the Universities of Bologna and Bari, the initiative is supported at local level by the Emilia-Romagna region, Bologna city council and Bologna health authority.

• SM2ART

  Turin Polytechnic, GTP and Reply have come together to create the research project called Sm2art. This aims to rethink how cities work, by considering the services covering an area little bigger than one square metre of public space. Sm2art studies how social norms condition individuals’ uses of systems and technologies, and vice versa, and seeks to develop the strategies for planning the new urban micro-infrastructure.

• RoMA - Resilence enhancement of a Metropolitan Area

  This initiative promotes research in sectors like land monitoring, predicting the risks of natural disasters, protecting individuals in areas at greatest risk and areas with cultural assets, and improving the analysis and control of urban traffic. The collection of services offered in a single integrated system (one that can therefore capitalise on and magnify the effect of an individual service by integrating it with the many others available) will contribute to enhancing the urban system’s resilience. City services will be available both in real time and offline to help shape urban-planning decisions, to inform planning and development strategies, and to tackle security problems in a modern, efficient manner. In addition, the RoMA project seeks to introduce a collaborative-management model involving citizens and the public institutions, to improve and extend the reach of land-use planning. The project partners are ACEA SpA, Roma Capitale, Cerveteri town council, and Telecom Italia SpA.