Amsterdam Smart City

Amsterdam Smart City (ASC) is a unique partnership between businesses, authorities, research institutions and the people of Amsterdam. The goal is to develop together the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area into a smart city. ASC is all about the total sum of testing innovative products and services, understanding the behavior of the residents and users of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area and sustainable economic investments. All the acquired knowledge and experience is shared via the ASC platform. In this way, ASC helps to accelerate climate and energy programs. The ultimate goal of all the activities is to contribute positively towards achieving CO2 emission targets, as well as aiding the economic development of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area. In doing so, the quality of life will improve for everyone.

Urban living labs
Amsterdam Smart City has established the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area as an urban living lab that allows businesses the potential to both test and demonstrate innovative products and services. Currently, ASC has a few recurring themes in the region, including sports parks, shopping areas, lighting, laws and regulations, connectivity and smart working. Within these, ASC looks at the development of replicable concepts that can be applied elsewhere in the region or nationally or even internationally. Next to this ASC has chosen a specific regional approach. By combining regional needs with the local investment agenda, there is the potential to create new products and services, and to test or scale them up in a practical environment – the urban living lab.

The activities of ASC in these urban living labs:

• Connecting parties, building consortiums.
• The creation of diverse urban living labs, in which activities are focused.
• Identifying and connecting to local investment portfolios.
• Gaining knowledge about residents and users of neighbourhoods.
• Identifying the needs and wishes of the residents and users of neighbourhoods.
• Energy potential analysis: technical, demographic and urban planning insights into the present and potential energy consumption of neighbourhoods.
• Knowledge exchange based on previous pilot projects. 

Some of the projects

The Digital Road Authority - Traffic flow IJburg (Smart Mobility)

During rush hours the island of IJburg suffers from reduced accessibility, due to the fact there are only two bridges connecting IJburg to the mainland. This creates traffic jams, making IJburg a less attractive place to live and work, so it’s important to improve traffic circulation.

The Digital Road Authority facilitates the cooperation between government bodies and private parties. It combines different types of traffic data in order to provide the residents of IJburg with personalized travel advice. Residents receive advice through an app, based on appointments in their phone’s calendar, their destination and the current situation at the traffic lights. The Digital Road Authority is not only in contact with departing travellers, but also with the traffic lights. It divides personal ‘travel slots’ based on current and expected traffic density. In case of (expected) high traffic density, the Digital Road Authority can also increase the ‘green time’ at the traffic lights to improve traffic circulation.

City-zen (Smart Grid)

The Amsterdam New West district contains approximately 40.000 families, of which around 10.000 are served by Alliander’s new Smart Grid. New West contains the largest amount of solar panels in Amsterdam. To align current developments and further ambitions in the field of sustainable power supply in New West, this district has been chosen for the construction of the first smart grid in the Netherlands.

This intelligent electricity network (smart grid) contains additional computers and sensors placed in the grid. As such current and voltage are monitored continuously to provide more accurate monitoring and control functions. In the past these functions weren’t available at this level. The Smart Grid provides Amsterdam with better and cheaper options to facilitate the energy transition and latest developments. 

Consumer benefits:
- reduction of the number and duration of power outages
- Better opportunity to feed consumer-produced electricity back to the grid
- Increased capability to support the integration of electric-powered vehicles
- Prevention of large price increases for electricity transmission
- Enablement of active participation in a sustainable energy supply

This grid enables the development and application of sustainable innovations in the New West district to determine how energy can be saved both now and in the future. Various companies are being brought together to investigate end test the use of various technologies, products and services in this neighborhood.

Smart CitySDK (Big & Open Data)

The CityService Development Kit (CitySDK) is a system that collects open data of governments, in order to provide their availability uniformly and in real-time. Withing this project Waag Society is responsible for the domain Mobility.

CitySDK is assisting seven European cities to release their data and offers tools to develop digital services. It also helps cities anticipate ever expanding technological possibilities. Over the past twenty years, Waag Society amassed much knowledge of technology and governmental sources. This was put to good use in the development of CitySDK. Think of services that help developers to make applications that offer personalized travel advice.