Badajoz Provincial Council. FIWARE4Cities book ed. 6

In this weekly series, we present to you each time one innovative city on its digital journey and on its way to become smart(er). This time, we have the Badajoz Provincial Council for you.

The province of Badajoz is an administrative region in southwestern Spain, a province of nearly 22,000 km2 with 669,000 inhabitants scattered throughout its 165 municipalities. As one of the least densely populated regions in the country, nearly 70% of the population lives in municipalities with less than 20,000 inhabitants. These smaller localities rely on the Provincial Council to provide public services such as sanitation, waste management, public infrastructure, etc. Tackling the digital transformation of such a sparsely populated province comes with many challenges, such as a geographically wide area of operation, different underlying infrastructure to that found in bigger cities, and the need to cover a variety of very different municipalities. The Provincial Council has implemented a centralised approach to digitalisation, providing a single, adaptable FIWARE-based Smart Platform that includes a supporting attendant expert staff. Implementation is carried out by either adding a layer of digitalisation to new or pre-existing public services or by allowing municipalities to determine the needs of their citizens and the best area to apply the Council’s resources.

The FIWARE Space initiative is part of the global project “Badajoz Es Más” and active Premium category iHUB.

The Provincial Platform

The core of the province of Badajoz's strategy for digitalisation —as implemented by the “Badajoz Es Más” initiative, the council’s overarching program for digital transformation— is the Provincial Platform for Smart Management of Public Services. This modular platform manages all the information from the nearly 50 smart solutions (YouTube video) implemented throughout the province and gathers it within a single data repository. These solutions range from traffic flow and EV charging station monitoring to street lighting and energy management for public infrastructure. This repository makes it available to the concerned parties (citizens, administration officials, technicians, etc.) either through a series of dashboards or through direct access to the database. The Provincial Platform uses the FIWARE Orion Context Broker as its core management tool. It also provides several functionalities using other components of the FIWARE Catalogue, such as Cygnus for data persistence, Keystone for identity management and authentication, Perseo for complex event processing, and a range of IoT Agents. Other functions, such as visualisation, are handled through external tools. This modularity ensures that the Provincial Platform can answer to the needs of all municipalities in the province.