In 2017 the City Council of Sant Feliu de Llobregat launched an ambitious plan for Digital Transformation that articulates the policies and actions to undertake in order to digitalise the administration and transform it into an engine for the economic, productive, social, democratic and cultural development of the territory.
This strategy marks a series of objectives to adapt in an agile way to the new demands of a changing context, providing trusted and secure information and digital services for any time and place, through multiple channels. In addition, it has the goal to generate new forms of relationship with citizens, so that they can participate in the definition and design of municipal policies and public services.
The strategic objectives of the Digital Transformation Strategy are: (a) to transform the productive structure of the organization and facilitate cultural change; (b) to develop Intelligent Governance; (c) to foster the Open Government Strategy; (d) to create an innovative and efficient service supply for citizens; (e) to deploy a new model of comprehensive and quality care for citizens and businesses.
The achievement of the previously identified strategic objectives is articulated in four axes of action: 1) Digital Administration; 2) Digital services, inclusive and innovative; 3) Relational framework with citizens and companies; 4) Technologies and tools for digital transformation.
In what regards Strategic Objective (b), “to Develop Smart Governance”, the City Council aims to achieve greater efficiency in internal processes by digitalising internal procedures and key management areas of the municipal administration, as well as guaranteeing that the city has the digital infrastructures required for the intelligent management of the territory. Such infrastructures are:
- The telecommunications infrastructures that allow collecting and transferring data and information from multiple sources scattered throughout the territory from both public and private sources;
- The technologies and tools that enable to storage, manage and publish large amounts of information (Big Data, Open Data, Indicators…);
- The systems of analysis, simulation, aggregation, mining and action of these data to convert them into information and knowledge (Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence, Facility Management, Prediction, Remote Management and control…);
- The solutions that ensure the interoperability between the different management systems of the public organizations, external agencies and private stakeholders with information on the city, in order to provide services such as transport, energy, environment, weather information, etc.
In order to integrate, manage and control Ðalso remotelyÐ, all of these infrastructures, the City Council decided to develop the expert system Brain4it, a generic tool, reusable in different scenarios, programable using a simple functional language, easy to learn, but powerful enough to implement complex algorithms of artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, learning, etc.
This expert system has made possible to have a unified point of access to data and to develop all the Smart City use cases, managing security and data governance with a modular and adaptable orientation. In fact, while being the brain of the system, Brain4it also facilitates the implementation of other expert systems and machine learning applications.