Using a Smart City District Simulator to Test New Digital Services

Cities have become more and more digital in recent years. They have developed various digital services that they provide to their citizens. However, it is often difficult to test ideas for new services from both a technical and a user-centric perspective. Reasons for this are, among others, that existing technical infrastructures provide a complex environment where deployment is often time-consuming. Furthermore, certain qualities such as performance or data protection have to be ensured, which is something a prototypical solution might not be able to offer. We are developing digital solutions for a smart city district, and one of our main challenges is that the area is still under construction and no technical infrastructure exists yet. Therefore, we developed a mock environment for a digital ecosystem in which we can easily test new ideas and early service prototypes. In this publication, we report on how we used this environment in a hackathon event and provide experiences from the participants that used our smart city district simulator. We provide examples of the solutions and discuss how our technical solution supported the development of new digital solutions and how it might also be a solution for other cities.