Smart City Project: Roeselare
Roeselare, a Belgian city located on the Mandel River and connected to the Leie River, is seen as the ‘Heart of West Flanders’. The city has a population of about 65,000 people. It has a rich cultural and historical heritage. One of the most prominent landmarks is the Belfry tower which is on the World Heritage list.
A city with a heart for entrepreneurs
Roeselare is known for its thriving business community and its commitment to innovation and sustainability. Entrepreneurship is part of Roeselare’s DNA. Therefore, in the further transition to a smart city, entrepreneurs play a significant role together with local institutions, citizens and educational representatives. These actors are referred to as ‘The Smart City Community’. They anticipate new trends and explore new opportunities. Initiatives like smart traffic lights, digitalization in the food sector and smart water management in combination with a new climate plan, ensure a high quality of life and enable the city to take on future challenges.
The Rainbrain project: city water management
Within the Rainbrain project, a Big Data and IoT platform is developed in addition to the Urban Sense platform to help cities and water management organizations monitor and limit risks of flooding, drought and water quality. Through a rapidly increasing number of sensors (water quality sensors, pluvio meters and water level sensors), data is being collected on the entire water system of Roeselare to help the city make better decisions.
With all the collected data, Roeselare aims to react, but more importantly, predict the impact of precipitation in a particular area to empty the necessary buffer basin in advance. Creating a dashboard with all the data in combination with an alerting mechanism, will help trigger action for the city and the water managers. This way, the city can better respond to water needs in the city.
The link with the project ‘Smart Waterland’ offers enormous potential in terms of smart water management with a high degree of predictability of problems. It’s an adequate approach to solve these challenges and better management of buffer capacity.
What the client thinks about the case
"Cities are facing a lot of challenges, but I think the biggest challenge of them all is how to gain correct data, how to control whether the data you are using is accurate. That is exactly why we are using the Smart City Data platform, to combine all of our data from different sensors on one platform. We then possess all the linked data from our suppliers in the same format, on the same platform so we can gain an accurate and complete picture of the different data streams in our city."
Geert Sinnaeve
Director ICT Services at the City of Roeselare
Roeselare as a part of Urban Sense
Roeselare is also part of the Urban Sense consortium, a collaboration between three Flemish cities, Leuven, Bruges and Roeselare, our company and Cegeka, to build and manage an urban data platform. Urban Sense’s effort and innovation has been recognized internationally by receiving the World Smart City Award and the Agoria Digital Society Award in 2022 with this project.
