Challenges

Florence needs to manage deliveries, access, parking and the use of public space in its historic centre as one coordinated system, so that logistics become more efficient, congestion and emissions fall, and public space becomes more usable and better adapted to heat, while respecting the centre’s heritage constraints.

Valencia needs integrated, neighbourhood-scale solutions that connect mobility, climate resilience and energy in its southern districts, so that residents can reach services reliably in everyday conditions and in extreme weather, and so that the districts are better prepared for future floods.

GZM needs an integrated, validated model for separate kitchen bio-waste collection that works for multi-family housing and scales across its municipalities.

Jena needs a unified, standards-based urban data infrastructure, operated under the city’s own control, that connects sensors, municipal IT systems, public transport and open data sources and complies with GDPR.

Tampere needs accessible, inclusive first- and last-mile mobility for older residents and people with accessibility needs, integrated with its public transport system, while reducing transport-related emissions as the city grows.

Parque de las Llamas is a large public park in Santander, described as one of the city’s green lungs and significant to the well-being of its inhabitants. The Municipality of Santander needs to gather trustworthy environmental and visitor-count data from Las Llamas Park, securely and without compromising visitor privacy.

Santander needs a structured, scalable model for opening its city-wide sensing infrastructure to approved external researchers and companies, rather than arranging access testbed by testbed.

Chamrousse, a French alpine ski resort, has limited visibility into skier flow and location across its slopes and facilities, making it harder to plan for congestion, capacity and on-slope safety at busy times. Chamrousse needs real-time visibility into skier flow and location to manage congestion, capacity and on-slope safety.

Genova needs an accessible, citizen-facing way to extend its civil-protection risk-awareness activity beyond periodic in-person events, so residents can check their own exposure and access preparedness guidance when they need it.

Santander has sought to encourage and reward resident participation in municipal civic initiatives. Santander needs a reusable way to encourage and reward citizen participation in municipal civic initiatives.

Santander has sought to improve everyday traffic management using real-time data from across the city. Santander needs integrated, real-time traffic-management information covering its road network.

Maintaining Fujisawa’s urban road network requires the timely identification of potholes, faded road markings and other surface defects. Fujisawa City needs continuous, city-wide road-condition data without the cost of a dedicated inspection-vehicle fleet — which reactive, citizen-report-based inspection cannot provide.

Households in Bristol can face high energy costs, and unnecessary consumption — including appliances left on standby or otherwise avoidable use — adds to this burden, particularly for households already at risk of energy poverty. Bristol households need a way to see their own appliance-level energy use in a form they can act on.

Sandyford Business District is a highly sealed, low-green business-park area on the outskirts of Dublin, home to a large daytime working population alongside a smaller residential community. Sandyford needs a way to identify where green-blue infrastructure would do the most good, and to convert appropriate sites into usable public space.

The Paris region needs a dependable way for emergency responders to coordinate and share real-time information during a major disaster, even when core infrastructure is degraded.

Athens needs a faster, more reliable way to integrate heterogeneous medical IoT devices into a single remote patient-monitoring service that keeps working under unstable network conditions.

Trento, a city of around 119 000 residents on the Brenner transport corridor, combines local urban movement with regional through-traffic on its road network. Trento needs real-time, privacy-preserving detection of road-safety risk at its intersections that does not depend on transmitting raw video to the cloud.

Nitrogen dioxide levels in central Bristol regularly exceeded legal limits, and structural fixes such as a Clean Air Zone would take years. In the meantime, people walking through the city had no way to see which streets were cleaner and choose a route that lowered their own exposure.

Workers at Grenoble’s Inovallée technology park relied on shared buses, canteens and events, but the information about them was spread across separate organisations. The park needed one real-time channel that brought these services together and gave it a direct line to its workforce.

Fingal is consulting residents on large public realm schemes that will reshape its town centres. Technical drawings and one-off public meetings leave many people unable to picture the changes or take part at all. The Council needs consultation that every resident can access, understand and respond to.

Fujisawa’s waste collection routes were set by tradition and adjusted informally, with no record of the paths, distances or times actually driven. The city needs operational data from its collection fleet to review and optimise routes, cut mileage and CO₂ emissions, and ideally to gather street-level environmental data at the same time.

Fujisawa measures air quality at a few fixed stations and learns about dumping, missed collections and damaged facilities only when someone happens to report them. The city needs street-level environmental data and structured incident reports across its whole territory — without the cost of building a dense network of fixed sensors.

Fujisawa runs an open urban sensing platform and invites residents to report on city life by photograph. Both create value precisely because they are open — and both expose information that has to be protected. The city needs security and privacy built into each of them without closing either one down.

Santander faces rising demand for tele-assistance as more older residents live alone, while the shift from button-press alerts to continuous sensor monitoring generates highly sensitive data about daily routines. The city seeks solutions that make always-on home monitoring secure and trustworthy enough for providers and residents to adopt at scale.

Tsukuba faces increasing disparities between its central urban areas and surrounding suburban zones, leading to unequal access to services, infrastructure, and economic opportunities. The city seeks integrated solutions to improve connectivity, accessibility, and balanced territorial development.

In major hubs like Istanbul and Helsinki, intersections are critical bottlenecks causing severe congestion and safety risks. Currently, monitoring is largely manual and fragmented, leading to slow response times. The AI4LIFE challenge implements an AI-based management system that integrates IoT infrastructure with real-time analytics. By automating the detection of abnormal traffic situations and consolidating multiple tools into a single hypervisor, the solution reduces response times, lowers emissions from idling, and enhances road safety for millions of commuters.

Urban Heat Islands have become a growing challenge for cities across Europe and globally, driven by climate change, increasing urban density, and the prevalence of highly mineralised urban environments. Recent European studies indicate that around 7% of heat-related mortality in cities can be attributed to the Urban Heat Island effect, highlighting urban heat as a significant public health risk, particularly during extreme heat events.

Fujisawa City faced a surge in maintenance reports for its public parks, but fragmented data made it difficult to prioritize interventions. This challenge introduced a mobile reporting system for staff and citizens, integrated into a smart city hypervisor. By centralizing GPS-tagged incident reports and applying AI-driven analytics, the city transitioned from reactive repairs to proactive, data-driven management. This optimizes municipal resources while ensuring higher safety and quality of life in urban green spaces.

Managing urban freight in dense areas like the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (AMB) is complex due to fragmented data and a lack of unified monitoring tools. The EyeDecide challenge addresses this by transforming raw data from the SPRO logistics app into actionable insights via an integrated AI platform. It enables the AMB to monitor freight activities, detect illegal parking, and forecast parking availability across nine municipalities. This data-driven approach optimizes logistics operations, reduces traffic congestion, and supports more sustainable urban mobility.

Urban intersections are high-risk zones where diverse users like cars, pedestrians, cyclists, and micro-mobility, interact in complex ways. This challenge seeks a low-latency, privacy-compliant solution using edge computing and AI to detect and analyze dangerous situations in real time. By processing data locally and sharing only anonymized insights, the system will improve safety, enable rapid responses, and support data-driven urban planning.