We make cities smart

More than half of humanity currently lives in cities, and according to the United Nations, by the year 2050 it will be almost 70 percent of the world's population or 6.3 billion citizens. The high density of people, the restricted access to existing resources and incalculable risks make highly technological cities vulnerable.

At the same time, this opens up greater opportunities to manage energy, material and human resources efficiently. It is the goal of the smart cities to seize these opportunities. For this purpose, methods, software architectures and tools are developed and solutions are optimized in agile processes in collaboration with the municipal actors. With partners from industry, administration and politics, Fraunhofer FOKUS designs the ICT infrastructures in public space in a secure, trustworthy, interoperable and user-friendly way.

The smart city becomes more of a service provider for its citizens and businesses and sees that things keep running smoothly through seamless and transparent administration processes. An optimally networked city not only makes everyday life easier in all aspects of life but also provides environmentally sustainable solutions.

Technological Backbone of the City

Smart city technologies will be the backbone of future cities. Based on intelligent information and communication technologies (ICT) and high-quality software architectures and systems, urban infrastructure is thus reliably operated to improve the quality of life for citizens in many ways. Energy, space, money and time are managed dynamically depending on current demands in the smart cities.

The technical communications infrastructure in the Smart City provides a never-ending stream of data. For this, open data is increasingly crucial and made available to citizens by public authorities and the private sector. This provides more transparency for the public and companies can use the data to improve their products or for new applications.

Fraunhofer FOKUS has many years of experience in designing and implementing the necessary open data platforms. One goal of FOKUS as a vendor-independent research institution is to initiate innovations in the field of urban infrastructures and to act in an advisory capacity. In cooperation with partners from industry, administration and politics, FOKUS takes care of the development process, practical tests and quality assurance of the hardware and software components involved.


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Development support for smart cities

Effective technical systems have to be integrated into the infrastructure and administrative systems of the city of the future. Municipal task fields like mobility, waste management and public safety are assessed for common interfaces and interactions and linked in a logical way to benefit the city. This leads to increased demands on the information and communication systems that run through the various technical systems of a city.

Integrated infrastructure and administrative systems lift the city of the future to a new quality level. They allow for analyses, safeguarding and optimization beyond subject, organizational and technological boundaries, whereby the interoperability, effectiveness, as well as the functional and IT safety of these solutions have to be designed and realized early on.

Therefore, Fraunhofer FOKUS is developing methods and tools for ascertaining the requirements of the ICT-based solutions, as well as their design, specifications, implementation and quality management. Particularly in the area of the model-based development of software-intensive systems and supportive tool chains for development and quality management processes, FOKUS has become internationally renowned for its technologies such as ModelBus or Fokus!MBT.


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Our test environments and solutions

To meet the challenges of changing cities, sientists of Fraunhofer FOKUS offer the following test environments and solutions:

Future Appication and Media

  • FAMIUM: Future Web Technologies and Streaming Media Ecosystem

Softwarequality


For further informations see on topic pages.


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