Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering
Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering

QuarZ

Using services with data sovereignty in the urban district of the future

 

The QuarZ project – "Quartier der Zukunft" – aims to improve the everyday lives of people in urban districts. Services, for example in the smart home, smart invoice, district network, and mobility fields, are being developed for this purpose within the project framework. The platform being created in the project converges the data of the increasingly networked urban living space, links them, and thereby makes them usable for additional smart services. Among others, the elements of the networked urban district include the installation of sensors for weather, environmental, and city data as well as a software platform to converge and use the data from these sensors, supplemented with data from other sources. A portal for tenants with an interface for smart home applications makes it easy to access the services in the home.

The challenge

The integration of various data obtained from the extensive sensors in the district and homes is of key importance for the development of a smart urban district. Data from these sources must be centrally collected, processed, and distributed to the individual services. Users are closely involved in the project and motivated to participate in designing the services to ensure good acceptance of the emerging solutions by the residents. To this end, the handling of data protection and data sovereignty is transparently communicated in order to build trust in the solutions.

 

Our contribution

Fraunhofer ISST is the project consortium’s scientific partner. On the service side, we are developing voice control, a graphical programming language, and a service to promote energy efficiency. These services are intended to make the platform user friendly and effectively promote acceptance. Another work package aims to ensure the digital sovereignty of residents on the urban district platform based on concepts and technologies from the International Data Spaces reference architecture. This allows residents to make appropriate decisions on what data they want to release for what purpose.

 

Results

The development results are to be expanded into a smart city platform that meets high data protection standards. Additional regions and municipalities can be integrated into the system. The number of commercial service providers can be increased. Additional insights can be gained by analyzing the data. One focus is on the approach of making data available across companies in order to generate groundbreaking value-added services (open data). 

 

Partners 

  • Stadtwerke Rüsselsheim GmbH
  • Fraunhofer FOKUS
  • Urban Software Institute GmbH
  • Discovergy GmbH  

 

Funding 

  • Subsidized by: Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action
  • Project number: 01MD18009A
  • Term: 04/2018-03/2021