✅ Finalized
⇨
Santander replicated Smiley Coupon, an application first trialled in Fujisawa that issues citizens and visitors personalised coupons according to their degree of smile — the clearest instance of Japan-to-Europe transfer in the project. This application gives customised coupons to citizens and tourists based on how much they smile. It was first developed in Fujisawa and then used in Santander to test if it could work in a different region.
To test whether a citizen-reward mechanism developed for a Japanese city transfers intact to a European one.
Santander City Council — UTA member city Capital of Cantabria and one of Europe’s pioneer smart cities, with a population of 175,425 across 36 km². It has deployed an extensive sensor network since 2010 under SmartSantander, covering parking, environment and traffic, and built an open urban data platform with NEC, Telefónica and EU-funded projects that other European cities now use as a replication template. Its focus areas are mobility, waste management and energy efficiency, with citizen participation and sustainable development alongside maritime and tourism sectors. In this pilot, the council was a ClouT consortium partner and host, supplying the sensor infrastructure and city data the application ran on.
University of Cantabria — UTA member, Academia ClouT consortium partner and the largest European beneficiary after the coordinator, leading the technical work on the Santander trials. The university’s smart city research group operates the SmartSantander testbed.
Santander is the capital of Cantabria on Spain’s northern Atlantic coast. It is a coastal city with about 175,000 people living in 36 km² and is considered one of Europe’s pioneering smart cities. Since 2010, it has operated the Smart Santander sensor network.
Santander had already solved the problem most cities still face. By 2013, the city had thousands of sensors in the ground, on street furniture, and on moving vehicles, producing live readings on traffic, parking, air, and noise. What it lacked was the layer that turns that into a decision someone makes on a pavement. Data existed in quantity; it did not reach a traveller choosing how to move. ClouT was the EU–Japan project where Santander built that layer. The European Union funded it, while Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology supported the Japanese partners. The project ran from 1 April 2013 to 30 June 2016 in four pilot cities: Santander, Genova, Mitaka, and Fujisawa. The project had 13 partners in total: six European partners from three countries and seven Japanese partners, including two research centres, two universities, five large industrial partners, and four cities.
The Smiley Coupon replication had a different goal. Fujisawa created the application to give customised coupons to citizens and tourists based on how much they smiled. Deploying it in Santander tested if an engagement tool designed for a Japanese city would also work in a Spanish coastal city. ClouT’s field trial index clearly lists it as a replication, showing the shared platform could support applications in both regions, not just a shared technical design.
Engagement mechanisms do not necessarily transfer across cultural and regulatory contexts, leaving an open question as to whether a citizen-reward scheme designed for Fujisawa could work effectively in Santander—something only real-world deployment could establish.
Tool/methodology — citizen engagement, transferred from Fujisawa.
This application gives customised coupons to citizens and tourists based on how much they smile. It was first developed in Fujisawa and then used in Santander to test if it could work in a different region.
Tool — IoT / cloud architecture
The application worked across ClouT’s three layers: the presentation layer (the mobility transport application), the processing layer (the mobility management module), and the infrastructure layer (IoT gateways and service aggregators that send data to central ClouT storage). These layers are organised as Infrastructure, Platform, and Software-as-a-Service tiers. The same setup was used for field trials in Genova, Mitaka, and Fujisawa.
Completed
It showed real transfer from Japan to Europe. Smiley Coupon was used in Fujisawa and then in Santander as a working application, which is more significant than just sharing specifications or a platform diagram.
It demonstrated that the ClouT architecture could support both a European mobility use case and Japanese environmental and engagement use cases using the same three-layer structure.
