IEC E-tech
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Artificial intelligence (AI) can supercharge urban
intelligence with the help of digital twins and sensors, as long as
international standards are part of the equation. The citiverse is on the
horizon!
Rome won the title of Smart City of 2025 at the
Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, which took place in November last
year. The award was to reward a data-driven initiative that improves governance
and public services, with the Italian capital rolling out 1 800
Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and more than 2 000 cameras connected by
Wi-Fi, 250 km of fibre-optic cables and 5G networks across its public
squares and busiest metro stations.
The concept of “smart cities” emerged in the early
1970s, when civic authorities began to collect and analyze data about services
to help them make decisions about planning and policy. As the volume and
capability of digital sensors and communications networks have advanced, so too
has the scope of smart cities. Projects now range from managing more efficient
transport and traffic systems to security surveillance, faster emergency
response, enhanced medical care and sustainable energy use.
AI and digital twins
The fast development of AI is viewed as a means of
accelerating those goals. “Cities globally are sprinting to adopt AI,” says
consultancy Deloitte in its report AI Powered Cities of the Future.
AI is seen “as a driver of greater productivity and efficiency and, ultimately,
economic growth and competitiveness”.
A key part of smart city development is digital twin
technology – a digital replica of the city – which makes it possible to see how
decisions affect urban life before they are deployed in the real world. This is
now evolving into the citiverse, an AI-driven virtual city which is expected to
be more efficient, more interactive and more transparent than a smart city,
ultimately supporting more participatory governance.
Sensors are everywhere
Fortune Business Insights projects that the IoT sensor
market will surpass USD 4 trillion by 2032, growing at a remarkable 24% a
year. IoT sensors can be added to digital devices like cameras and
non-digital street furniture like waste bins to measure the status of garbage
containers while air quality meters measure pollution and light
levels.
There is clear overlap between the markets for the IoT and
that for smart cities. The value of the latter is estimated to top
USD 3,7 trillion globally by 2030 growing at a compound annual growth rate
(CAGR) of 29,4%. Rapid urbanization, which according to some figures, will
see 68% of the world’s population living in cities by 2050, is
putting governments and municipalities “under immense pressure” to improve
infrastructure and adopt sustainable and efficient city planning solutions.
Such solutions include smart LED lights with
motion detectors to save electricity; interoperable smart home
technologies to reduce carbon emissions and electrotechnical waste; more
accessible and personalized healthcare; and connected transport
systems which monitor traffic conditions in real time with safety and
traffic management benefits.
Virtual simulation
The holistic data-centric and real-time view of a city is
increasingly being visualized virtually. By creating 3D digital twins of
cities, “planners can simulate and test the impact of new developments,
identify potential issues, optimize city services and proactively create
policies to avoid future impact,” explain analysts at Capgemini.
Singapore is widely held to have launched the first
virtual model for smarter urban planning. Dozens of other cities include Helsinki,
with its virtual rendering of the city’s environment, operations and changing
circumstances; and Rotterdam, which debuted its Open Urban Platform last
January, and into which not just the city authority but companies, schools and
residents are encouraged to participate and “exchange all kinds of data”.
Big data requires AI and machine learning
In order for projects like these to scale, smart cities must
be able to manage the “unprecedented surge in data generation and flows” from
diverse datasets of public and private infrastructure. Urban Data Platforms –
described as the “central nervous system” of a smart city – perform the role of
aggregating, processing and analyzing data from across the urban area, captured
by sensors. The application of artificial intelligence and machine learning
(AI/ML) to this platform layer (and to the IoT sensors themselves) is claimed
to supercharge performance by enabling cities to “move beyond reactive
management to proactive, data-driven governance”.
For example, AI/ML algorithms can analyze historical and
real-time data to predict traffic congestion or potential crime hotspots.
Beyond prediction, AI tools can recommend actions, such as optimizing waste
collection routes, and identify data anomalies that might signal water leaks so
that preventative measures can be taken before the situation worsens.
According to one report, it is the application of AI
that “turns connected devices into smart devices”. Calling this shift “urban
intelligence”, a developer of AI-powered sensors says that cities in Australia
suffered “persistent problems” in managing urban environments before the
introduction of AI. Issues related to “manual data collection, unstructured
data and limited feedback loops with residents” led to delayed or inaccurate
insights and missed opportunities.
Devices and software augmented with AI and fed into a urban
platform can unify disparate data sets, spot patterns and apply analysis
rapidly to deliver insights or automate responses. One result, given by the
Australian developer, is the automatic optimization of traffic signals to ease
congestion, which in turn leads to “smoother commutes, reduced emissions and
increased public transport reliability”.
Challenges and standards
The caveat is that while there is strong interest
(from 96% of city mayors in one survey) in using AI to augment smart
city infrastructure, today there is still little practical implementation of
the technology. Questions remain around the impact of AI on city services and
its ethical, legal and social implications.
That is where international standards can play a role: their
use and implementation can reassure decision-makers that these aspects have
been taken into consideration. Standardization in AI is carried out by the
joint technical committee formed between the IEC and ISO, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC
42, which considers the entire ecosystem in which AI systems are developed and
deployed. The committee develops horizontal standards that provide a foundation
for creating AI solutions across diverse industries. It is increasingly
addressing societal and ethical issues, such as how to avoid bias or how to
protect human rights.
The three mains standardization organizations, the
IEC, ISO and ITU, have just published a joint statement on
the governance of AI during the International AI Standards Summit, which took
place in Seoul in December 2025. The statement sets out a joint vision and
commitments from the three organizations for how international standards will
support the development and deployment of trustworthy AI systems that benefit
society, drive innovation and uphold fundamental rights.
From smart cities to citiverse
The first meeting of an initiative designed to
shape the future of cities in relation to AI-powered virtual worlds convened in
November 2025. Led by ITU and United Nations International Computing
Centre (UNICC), the meeting touched upon the concept of citiverse, which is
partly viewed as the ideal future of the smart city.
“The citiverse can be seen as the next digital frontier for
cities,” explains Cristina Bueti, the Counsellor on Smart Sustainable
Cities, Citiverse & Virtual Worlds at ITU. “It goes beyond the smart city
by creating a trusted, immersive digital environment where cities can leverage
enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality and
extended reality.
“In the citiverse, AI acts as the backbone, allowing cities
to offer citizens new immersive experiences and to enhance the city itself
through digital layers that are interactive, predictive and participatory. This
creates a shared digital space where leaders can test decisions in advance,
improve services and design better solutions before implementation. It allows
cities to anticipate drawbacks and understand the real impact of policies from
the citizens’ perspective”, she adds.
Interoperability is the key requirement
A shared citiverse is being built under the
European Union’s Digital Decade Programme 2030 where different cities can
interoperate and collaborate. “Interoperability is the first challenge to
address,” Bueti says. “Today, many cities cannot even share data with their
neighbouring cities because they rely on vendor-specific platforms. A shared
citiverse would allow cities to share data, procurement solutions and services,
achieving efficiency gains in cost, time and service delivery – all with the
goal of better serving citizens.”
Learning from neighbouring cities and sharing data improves
the quality of decision-making by allowing cities to base policies on broader
datasets rather than isolated local information. “In Europe, this aligns well
with an existing human-centric framework that emphasizes accessibility,
interoperability, safety and the protection of fundamental rights,” Bueti
stresses.
Fourteen European countries have declared participation in
the project including the Netherlands where Rotterdam recently upgraded the
head of its digital city programme to be the world’s first Chief Citiverse
Officer. As Bueti notes, the citiverse is a nascent concept and is dependent
for its success on the building blocks of regional data, service
interoperability and metrics to evaluate progress. It is also dependent on
standards for interoperability and trustworthiness. The more standards are used,
the less likely solutions will be proprietary and not talk to each other.
In December 2023, the Standardization Landscape for
CitiVerse was published by European standardization experts, listing
around 350 standards and other deliverables. It includes standards such
as ISO/IEC 30141 for an IoT reference architecture, and the
future ISO/IEC 3018 for a digital twin architecture, both
published by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 41, as well as IEC 63205 for a smart
cities reference architecture, published by the IEC Systems Committee for Smart
Cities.
In addition, the IEC has recently joined forces with ISO to
create a new joint technical committee, ISO/IEC JTC 4, which prepares
standards for smart and sustainable cities and communities. The committee aims
to build on the existing work of the IEC and ISO to foster the development of
standards in fields such as sustainability, community infrastructure,
digitalization, and more.
“We strongly value the long-standing collaboration between
international standards organizations such as the IEC and ISO. Our goal is not
to reinvent the wheel, but to build on the excellent work already done.
Frameworks being developed will help cities think from the start about the
technical structures they need to adopt the citiverse effectively,” Bueti
concludes.
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