The conference and spa city of Bad Hersfeld has implemented a digital first strategy supported with the [ui!] UrbanPulse open data platform. Located in the physical centre of Germany and a hub for rail and road logistics, Bad Hersfeld has a resident population of 30,000 which swells with an additional 100,000 visitors each year (and in 2019, for the Hessentag festival, this was 800,000 visitors). City issues include air quality, congestion, parking, security, visitor management and noise.

Previously traffic, environmental, lighting sensors and systems collected and stored data in siloes and in third party systems. In addition, residents were asked to capture data such as noise nuisance on their smartphones. This meant that City strategy planning and enforcement actions did not have a real time overview of all available data. The City did not own or manage all of its own data and that cost of bringing data together could only grow into the future.

To create a holistic approach, Bad Hersfeld changed their procurement policy to require all municipal purchases to include tender qualification for data management through their open City platform. This means that all new sensors, systems and city data will be connected to the open City platform. Where possible it connected existing sources of data as well as building analytics reports and visualisation dashboards with [ui!] COCKPIT.

Now noise and climate information is collected, analysed and visualised on the [ui!] UrbanPulse central data platform by environmental sensors distributed throughout the town. This enables a clearer and near-real-time analysis of climate data. Through the [ui!] COCKPIT dashboards local data is also shared with residents.

The advantage for Bad Hersfeld of their approach lies in guaranteed data sovereignty, which means that the city can always decide for itself which data it wants to use.

data platform and visualisation