The Latvian city Jelgava is widely recognised in Baltic region as one of the North European leaders in the practical implementation of Smart City concepts for the daily life of its ~70 thousands of citizens living in the area of 60 Km2 with 41 educational institutions.

The Jelgava City Council had set strategic objectives to provide inhabitants with stability and predictability of urban life, transparency of developments in infrastructure and educational processes, fostering high employment rate, cultural events, as well as economic growth and welfare. The Jelgava Smart City programs began with mobile citizen e-cards for transportation and social services for pensioners and school students, smart traffic flow management applying lightning sensors, security cameras and improving energy efficiency, use of renewable energy resources and green transport, energy planning and data management.

Key city achievements included the Sustainable Energy Action Plan (SEAP) in cooperation with the Government of Germany to demonstrate smart management of the district heating systems operated and monitored from a single biomass combined heat and power (CHP) plant and establishment of Joint Municipality Operative Information Centre (JMOIC)  in 2016 to monitor the city public area and critical infrastructure with the latest technology solutions (27/7 citizens contact centre, video surveillance system, GIS, energy monitoring, flood maps, road traffics accident map, drone images database, etc.)

After extensive experimentation with Smart City Monitor digital transformation technology platform during 2018-2019 effectively supported by the Latvian company OPTOKON Baltic, the municipality decided to obtain the license for its implementation to support the  ambitious city incentives in AI- and Big Data - driven digital transformation.

The key technology applications will include setting up the large network of air quality, environment, energy and transport infrastructure sensors and systems linked to LoRaWan and optical cable connectivity networks to collect big data and transform it into key performance indicators for major urban infrastructure objects and processes, and automatically control their efficiency and sustainability statuses in real time.

The unique disruptive technology Smart City Monitor, developed by the Austrian company GOLEM Integrated Microelectronics Solutions GMBH, provides cutting-edge IoT integration platform to make and run the city Digital Twins which are capable to monitor automatically large number of urban processes in real time and assist administrations and citizens in Smart Sustainable and Transparent Management of their cities.