TIPS4PED consortium convenes in Barcelona for second General Assembly

On 6-7 November 2024, the TIPS4PED project partners were hosted by FACTUAL Consulting in Barcelona, meeting on the sidelines of the Smart City Expo World Congress to update one another on the progress made so far and engage in several workshops.

TIPS4PED partners engaged co-creation activities to establish IAP inputs and outputs.

The project is now in month 11, over a quarter of the way through the total duration, and activities are in full swing. Outlining all project work, the Executive Action Plan is now available to partners to ensure effective coordination, timely delivery and high-quality results. Also available is the Data Management Plan that will support transparent and accessible data sharing between partners throughout the project lifecycle.

Partners from each demonstration site provided a summary of their first assessment of user needs and requirements collected during the in-person focus groups with local stakeholders. These sessions provided valuable insights as to the local stakeholder needs were a PED to be developed in their city. A more detailed analysis of the cities’ needs and TIPS4PED assessment tool requirements will be available soon.

Project partner, LINKS, then conducted a workshop in which all project partners formed groups to brainstorm the ideal PED in each city and what data inputs and outputs would be required of an Integrated Assessment Platform (IAP) to go about implementing such a PED.

The afternoon saw the unveiling of LUT’s gamified co-creation activity, an innovative and slightly competitive board game in which participants role played various local stakeholders at different stages of the awareness/unawareness scale around climate change and potential actions to combat its causes. The game’s objective is to foster creativity amongst stakeholders whilst also educating and builds on LUT’s experience of urban data games.

TIPS4PED partners engaged in a boardgame to simulate stakeholder awareness and concerns around a PED.

Day two picked things up with an overview of Work Package 2: Energy and Mobility services deployment, led by IES, which will build on the requirements, KPIs, stakeholder and city needs. The Feasibility Assessment Tool will be an open-source PlanHeat application to simulate and compare alternative low-carbon and economically suitable scenarios. Using QGIS plug-ins developed by project partners, the tool will allow the integration of additional data layers to increase the accuracy of planning criteria and simulation outputs. This tool will serve as the foundation for the Digital Twins developed as part of the TIPS4PED project.

After two fruitful days of interactive and informative sessions, TIPS4PED is now fully underway with partners all working towards the project’s objectives to enable sustainable urban development in the form of positive energy districts. In the coming months, we will be sharing more detailed analysis of the results so far, handy explainers to help familiarise the public with the concept of a PED and of course, sharing updates from within the project consortium as and when they come.

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