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Hitachi to Build Smart City Platform for Copenhagen

Copenhagen’s City Data Exchange, a smart city effort, is targeted at IoT use cases in transportation and energy.

Written By

May 20, 2016

Hitachi Insight Group, the company’s newly formed IoT subsidiary, has announced that they’ve been chosen to create a new smart city platform for the city of Copenhagen.

The new platform will be called the City Data Exchange, according to a May 19 announcement, and would make public and anonymous citizen data more accessible to government agencies, businesses and residents. It hopes to also help Copenhagen achieve its goal of being carbon-neutral by 2025.

Hitachi said it will work with the City of Copenhagen, Capital Region, the Danish cluster organization, CLEAN, and a consortium of alliance partners, to develop the platform.

“The new Big Data platform is expected to provide citizens and businesses access to information, which among other things, can create new technological solutions,” said Lord Mayor of Copenhagen Frank Jensen in the announcement. “For instance, developing applications to save energy and increase mobility for companies and citizens.”

Copenhagen is already considered a leader in smart cities technology, but the data generated is fragmented and not easily accessible through one main interface. The city already has smart lighting and smart traffic management systems in place, both of which generate massive volumes of data. The Data Exchange will aggregate that data plus other kinds of data categories including city life, infrastructure, environment, business, economy, demographics, housing, buildings and utilities, according to EWeek. Hitachi also told EWeek the data will be anonymized to protect privacy and ensure security.

To begin, Hitachi plans to develop two new applications, Journey Insight and Energy Insight. Journey will allow citizens to track their carbon footprint and how they use transportation, and Energy will help them keep track of energy usage. Both are expected to be released later this year, Hitachi said.

As of now, only raw data is available, but the company said they will be adding analytics tools later this year. They’ll be available as a subscription service, which they said will cost much less than if the city tried to analyze the data by itself.

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Sue Walsh

Sue Walsh is News Writer for RTInsights, and a freelance writer and social media manager living in New York City. Her specialties include tech, security and e-commerce. You can follow her on Twitter at @girlfridaygeek.