EcoCityTools presented by 1Spatial wins the GeoSpatial Award 2021 at BeGeo
Paris, France, October 30, 2021.
At BeGeo, the Belgian national congress dedicated to geographic information, the EcoCityTools project presented by 1Spatial wins the GeoSpatial Award 2021 Professional.
The EcoCityTools project - a step towards a more comfortable city for its citizens and visitors - is a collaborative innovation project within the SmartCites concept.
The densification of the population leads to many challenges related to air quality, energy transition, management of underground networks, demography, mobility, ... It is therefore imperative to have efficient assessment tools that will allow defining policies to improve the quality of life of citizens in a sustainable framework.
Decision-making tools and services
Similarly, it is becoming essential to offer decision support tools and services to clients and stakeholders that will enable them to effectively establish environmental and energy diagnoses at the neighborhood level. It encourages dialogue, collaboration and sharing between the various public and private players in urban development, particularly those involved in design and management.
Decision-making, implementation and management processes will be improved by sharing information using digital tools and interoperable data through a 3D representation of the city such as City Information Management (CIM).
EcoCityTools: An innovative collaborative project
The EcoCityTools innovation project has proven the relevance of an approach that brings together complementary stakeholders from the industrial and academic sectors to address these major challenges.
It brought together Belgian partners from various and complementary fields:
- In the field of simulation (Arcadis, ATM-PRO, Cenaero),
- In metrology (Meterbuy, Odometric),
- In engineering (Arcadis, Cenaero),
- In academic research (the University of Liege through three of its laboratories : the Geomatics Unit of Professor Roland Billen, Sensing of Atmospheres and Monitoring (SAM) of Professor Anne-Claude Romain, EnergySuD of Professor Jean-Marie Hauglustaine),
- In 3D geographic information systems (1Spatial, also coordinator/integrator of the project).
A data warehouse and an exchange platform
The results of the project consisted in the implementation of an exchange platform, tools and services to provide assessments and measurements concerning thermal comfort, air quality and energy cadastre at the neighbourhood scale.
The data warehouse and the exchange platform, based on the 3D GIS, ensure the availability of the necessary data to carry out the relevant environmental studies and significantly reduce the costs of these studies. The data used concerns buildings, DTM, DSM, vegetation, roads, etc., but also climatological data, pollution sources, land registry, land use, etc., on a national geographic coverage made available through standard web service protocols such as WFS, WPS, SOS.
Innovative cross-diagnosis
The data used in the GIS have been processed and integrated by 1Spatial. They are mostly available in OpenData and/or accessible free of charge for administrations, on a regional, national or European coverage (PICC, GRB, UrbIS, E-PRTR, CLC, ISSeP, ...). Data transformations were sometimes necessary: extruding 2D data into 3D (PICC), performing aggregations and anonymizations (Cadastre), creating grids with CLC and Z DTM and DSM (for climatology), verifying the intersection of 3D data (for CFD simulation), ...
The richness of the solution is materialised by the integration of the results provided by the tools and their availability through the exchange platform. This has also allowed to provide innovative cross-diagnosis.
The EcoCityTools project was co-financed by the Walloon Region.