Smart Company Project:
District09

District09 is the ICT-partner of the city of Ghent, who is providing a reliable, stable and secure ICT-environment for the City, its inhabitants, visitors, commuters, students and employees. District09 is using both revolutionary and low-treshold technology and digitization to tackle urban challenges, all in collaboration with citizens, educational institutions, government institutions and innovative start-ups and scale-ups like Sirus.

What was needed?

Sirus was asked to develop an extensive application to deal more efficiently with parking permits and permissions to enter the car-free area of the city. With the help of smart cameras in the city, the license plates of all the cars in the city had to be immediately passed on to see which cars are permitted and which ones need to be fined.

What Sirus provided

Sirus developed the back-end API for this application, as well as the database and communication with external services. Since District09 possesses a lot of external services, such as the generation of PDF’s, the sending of e-mails and the retrieval of personal data from the national register, we had to ensure an efficient flow between these different required services for the project.

Furthermore, there are different ways for citizens to obtain a permit for parking or for entering the car-free zone. This depends on whether the request is made by a person, healthcare provider or company. We had to make sure this request flow was logical and correct.

Technicalities of the project

Environment:

Database: Microsoft SQL Server 2019
Web server: IIS
Container platform: Redhat Openshift 3
Queue: AMQ Artemis
Authentication: Keycloak / Vlaanderen ACM/IDM
Logging: Elastic

Frameworks:

Angular 13
.NET Core 3.1 / .NET 6
EF Core
MassTransit

Tools:

VSCode
Visual Studio 2022
Docker Desktop

Request flow of the application

Sign in

In order to obtain a permit, people need to sign in using strong authentication (E-Id, Itsme).

Upload documents

Depending on the product, the person applying for a permit is then asked to upload the necessary documents and register his/her license plate(s). In addition, he/she can make payment for the permit online.

Assessment by the internal department

Next, the permits must be assessed by the internal department at the city of Ghent. There's a team of employees responsible for handling the permit requests.

Approval & communication with smart cameras

Finally, the application is also linked to the smart cameras in the city. If your demand is approved, your license plate is passed on to the smart cameras in the city, which consequently know which vehicles are allowed in the car-free zones and should not receive any fines.

What our Sirus’ members think about the case

“The project at District09 is very challenging because you have to deal with a circle of various communication flows. The project is also very tangible because people regularly come into contact with the practical implementation of this permit application. And that’s exactly what makes this project even more interesting.” – Janiek, .NET Developer at Sirus