Living PlanIT's response as a business is to bring together corporations, educational institutions and people, as partners, to stimulate, accelerate and incubate the technological innovation that is essential to provide better city living, and to bring these solutions to the world market. Living PlanIT also pursues a strong educational mission – to provoke intelligent new thinking about the dominant trends in global urbanization and to help find the solutions that create knowledge economies and improve people's lives.

Leading the way in Convergent Urban Technologies

At the core of Living PlanIT's approach is an integrated platform for managing city operations. The high-level convergence of information and control systems with the fabric of buildings, infrastructure, places and mobility is critical to being able to respond holistically to the challenges posed by urbanization and associated issues of environmental sustainability. The convergence of manufacturing processes and enabling technologies is delivered through Living PlanIT and Cisco's ecosystem of partners.

Cisco's technologies provide the infrastructure for Living PlanIT's Xtreme Construction (XTC™) and Urban Operating System (UOS™) platforms. XTC™ provides the method by which technologies are embedded in the fabrication of buildings and places while the UOS™ provides the orchestration, sensing and operational framework for urban environments. This process separates and supports city hardware such as renewable energy, water and waste systems from resident and user focused applications

The efficiencies delivered by new fabrication processes will enable advanced technologies to be deployed at scale, dispelling the myth that improved utility or sustainability is unaffordable. Consequently buildings and infrastructure are delivered faster, cheaper, with improved quality and utility, negligible environmental impact and significantly reduced operations and maintenance costs.

To achieve such results, the UOS™ must be able to sense, feel, observe and orchestrate city hardware through advanced networks of sensors and actuators. Historically, building control systems have been based on proprietary hardware and cabling standards. By integrating Cisco's technology with Living PlanIT's UOS™ and sensor and data systems (recently acquired by Living PlanIT from McLaren Electronic Systems) all systems and networks are rationalized, providing a unifying architecture delivered by standards based components and protocols.

Living PlanIT is planning to deploy approximately 100 million sensors in PlanIT Valley, the exemplar of the next generation of intelligent connected cities, in Northern Portugal, representing vast amounts of time series data collected and processed on a daily basis.

Global opportunities in global partnership

A recent UN study predicted that there would be up to 10,000 new cities by 2050. Living PlanIT and its partners are focused on addressing this megatrend and the opportunities that it creates, together with the substantial retrofit and rebuilding opportunities in mature cities particularly in Europe and the US. Living PlanIT is expecting to make a number of announcements for partnerships with some of the world's major cities where, together with its partners, it will provide orchestrated solutions for a wide range of infrastructural issues.

The Living PlanIT delivery model is based on an ecosystem of partners who develop technologies collectively and deploy them to maximize their reach and scalability. The founding partners - a group of the world's leading companies, including McLaren, Buro Happold, Cisco and Accenture, work together with a growing number of companies and SMEs in Living PlanIT's partner ecosystem.