From Data to Impact: How Does CIRCE Help Build More Resilient, Efficient and Future-Ready Cities?

How can cities prepare for heat, reduce energy consumption, manage their resources more effectively and turn urban data into actionable insights? CIRCE will showcase its answers at Smart City Expo World Congress 2026, taking place from 3 to 5 November at Fira Barcelona.

Under the theme FROM INSIGHT TO IMPACT. Technology for Urban Resilience and Transformation, the technology centre will bring solutions powered by artificial intelligence, digital twins and advanced analytics to stand F160, helping public authorities and urban service providers cut costs, optimise resources and make better-informed investment decisions.

How can urban challenges be turned into decisions that deliver impact?

At its stand, CIRCE will showcase tools for assessing scenarios, prioritising actions and improving urban management across five key areas:

1. Urban energy renovation and planning to help public authorities plan their investments. Using digital twins and energy modelling, CIRCE enables authorities to analyse buildings, neighbourhoods and districts before investing, compare scenarios and target resources and action plans where they can deliver the greatest impact.
2. Climate change adaptation to make cities more resilient and people-centred. Analysing the thermal behaviour of streets, squares and buildings to identify vulnerable areas, compare mitigation measures and design strategies tailored to each municipality.
3. Smart management to recover value from waste and make public facilities more efficient. Solutions that apply artificial intelligence and advanced modelling to reduce energy consumption in wastewater treatment, optimise waste treatment and create new opportunities for resource recovery.
4. IoT, connectivity and cybersecurity to make cities smarter while protecting essential services. CIRCE helps manufacturers, operators and public authorities validate the connectivity, interoperability, reliability and cybersecurity of sensors and devices to deploy connected, secure urban infrastructure.
5. Smart urban mobility. Solutions powered by artificial intelligence, computer vision and data analytics to improve urban infrastructure operations and optimise mobility management in real time.

OmniaLight: from traffic data to real-time decisions

Alongside its stand, CIRCE will also be present in the congress’s demo area, where attendees can experience OmniaLight first-hand—one of the sustainable mobility solutions CIRCE is developing.

OmniaLight combines artificial intelligence and computer vision to adjust traffic light operation in real time based on the presence of pedestrians. The system detects and analyses people’s presence and their intention to cross, using this information to adapt traffic light phases to demand.

The demonstration will showcase a tangible application of urban digitalisation: using data generated by the city itself to make mobility safer, smoother and more efficient.

CIRCE Talks: practical answers to the challenges cities face today

As well as discovering the solutions CIRCE will bring to Barcelona, visitors to stand F160 will be able to explore some of the challenges already shaping decisions in cities and municipalities.

The CIRCE Talks will comprise four short, practical sessions covering IoT and cybersecurity, building renovation using digital twins, adaptation to heat and wildfires, and artificial intelligence applied to waste management and wastewater treatment.

Want to attend? Reserve your place and let us know which talk interests you.

👉 Register for the CIRCE Talks and visit us at SCEWC 2026

Green computing for smart cities: CIRCE’s experience in the ASCENDER project

The digital transformation of cities also comes with an energy cost. On the main stage in Hall 3, CIRCE’s Director of Energy Efficiency, Víctor Ballestín, will address an increasingly relevant question: how to choose the most energy-efficient computing resource—edge, cloud or high-performance computing (HPC)—to process smart city data.

Drawing on experience from the ASCENDER project, led by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and an urban electric mobility use case, he will explain CIRCE’s work to characterise the energy consumption of different computing resources and develop an orchestrator capable of selecting the most efficient option for each task in real time without compromising performance.

This approach introduces a new consideration into urban digitalisation: not only what data we process or how quickly, but how much energy we need to do so.

Let’s talk in Barcelona

Energy, mobility, urban regeneration, resource management, climate adaptation, connectivity or cybersecurity. Whatever the challenge, our team will be in Barcelona to share experience, showcase solutions and explore how technology can help you address it.

Visit stand F160 (Hall 3) and tell us about your challenge. We look forward to seeing you at Fira Barcelona from 3 to 5 November.