Home / Our model
Strategy and roadmap
A city that generates intelligence
This is not a catalogue of technology: it is a cycle. Each turn leaves the city better prepared for the next, because the information Murcia generates comes back to Murcia in the form of decisions. This page explains the seven stages and what has already been built at each one.
“The City Council provides capabilities; the community generates intelligence.”
Stage 01 / 07 · Connect
City-owned networks, sensors and services stop operating in isolation
Before a city can be intelligent, it needs to be robust on the inside. This first stage does not produce a visible service: it creates the conditions that make all the others possible.
Municipal fibre · 2 data centres · IoT
CONNECT Factor →
Municipal network of networks in four phases, from 2016 to 2026
Two redundant data centres linked by a dual ring of city-owned fibre, with the IoT layer isolated from the administrative network.
MiMurcia project page →
91 km of new fibre and 1,250 smart cameras
More than 100,000 individually manageable lighting points and soil-moisture sensors in more than 100 parks.
Stage 02 / 07 · Understand
Data is standardised and combined into a single view of the city
Having sensors is not enough: if every service stores its data in its own format, the city is still seen in fragments. This stage is what turns a collection of projects into a system.
MiMurcia · FIWARE · UNE 178104
MiMurcia project page →
European FIWARE standard and UNE 178104
It does not matter who manufactured the sensor: water data can be correlated with lighting or transport data. In 2026 the platform migrates to NGSI-LD.
CONNECT Factor →
Interoperability as a policy decision
Open standards prevent vendor lock-in and allow what is built here to be transferred to other municipalities.
Murcia Living Lab →
And that is why third parties can use the data
Standardisation is also what makes it possible to open APIs to universities and companies without custom development.
Stage 03 / 07 · Anticipate
Digital twins test the future before it happens
This is the shift from observation to preventive action. It is where artificial intelligence comes in as a cross-cutting capability —not as a separate Factor— and where the city stops reacting too late.
Flooding · traffic · AI
Story · flooding →
3 to 6 hours' advance warning, recalculated every ten minutes
The twin developed with EMUASA combines recorded rainfall, forecasts and 235 sewerage sectors to calculate expected flood depth street by street.
MiMurcia project page →
Two operational digital twins
Flooding and traffic, with the latter simulating closures and diversions before they are implemented.
UCAM HiTech and TicBiomed →
Predictive AI in health as well
INTECC and Vasomaly apply artificial intelligence to diagnosis; the predictive pollen model developed with UPCT alerts vulnerable groups.
Stage 04 / 07 · Act
A single centre coordinates police, fire services, traffic and municipal services
Anticipation is of little use if the response remains split across departments that do not communicate. This stage breaks down the silos: everyone who needs to act shares the same view of the city.
CEUS · Civil Protection
CEUS project page →
More than 300 municipal systems integrated
The unified centre classifies risk, triggers coordinated workflows and keeps essential services operating through any physical outage.
TuMurcia project page →
And acting also means responding to residents
A citizen report enters the CEUS operational dashboard with geolocation, is routed to the responsible service and returns to the resident with closure confirmation.
Stage 05 / 07 · Evaluate
Real outcomes are measured, not money spent
This is the stage that distinguishes policy from publicity. The question is not how much was invested, but what changed: fewer degrees on the street, fewer litres of water used, fewer tonnes of CO₂.
Indicators · audit · SECAP
ALEM project page →
SECAP as a measurement system
High-precision emissions inventories combining mobility, lighting and waste data: dynamic governance instead of a static report, with a binding −40% commitment to the EU.
Cañada Hermosa →
Audited climate impact
More than 175,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions avoided each year: a verified figure, not a project estimate.
Murcia Río →
The sensors measure whether it worked
CEUS data confirms temperatures 1 to 4 °C lower around the river, with 81% of the Master Plan completed.
Stage 06 / 07 · Learn
Universities, companies and residents work with real data
Here the City Council stops being the one that knows and becomes the one that enables. This is the stage where the cycle opens up: if only the administration learned, the city would grow at the pace of a single actor.
Living Lab · university chairs · APIs
Murcia Living Lab →
The entire city as a testbed
Murcia Smart City Chair with UMU in AI, cybersecurity and IoT; agreement with UPCT for the Urban Planning Observatory and Urban Research Laboratory.
INNOVATE Factor →
More than 600 projects mentored
CEEIM, Wannaseed and UCAM HiTech turn knowledge into economic activity; TicBiomed does so through Public Procurement of Innovation.
INCLUDE Factor →
Residents learn too
More than 12,000 digital-support sessions and over 85,000 Form@carm users: without digital skills, the cycle excludes the people who need it most.
Stage 07 / 07 · Improve
The validated solution is deployed and the cycle begins again
The final stage closes the circle and, in doing so, opens it again: what has been validated becomes a public service, is standardised and becomes available for others to build on.
Scale · transfer · standards
NaviLens project page →
From local pilot to exported standard
Refined in Murcia as a living lab since 2018, it is now used on the metro systems of New York, London and Tokyo. Murcia has 32,000 smart signs and 100 information totems in the historic centre.
EDIC consortium →
Transfer without lock-in
Murcia shares its digital twin with other European cities without depending on proprietary vendors: lessons learned elsewhere can also be incorporated.
Migration to NGSI-LD →
Improvement also means rebuilding the foundations
In 2026 the platform moves to native NGSI-LD operation as part of the Smart Destination Platform project: the cycle returns to stage 01.
The cycle is not a straight line
All seven stages happen at the same time
Presenting it as a numbered sequence helps explain it, but it would be misleading to read it as a project with a beginning and an end. At any given moment Murcia is connecting new infrastructure, understanding data it already has, anticipating a rainfall event, acting on an incident, evaluating last year's policy, learning through ongoing research and improving a service already in operation.
What moves the whole system forward is not completing the seven stages once, but ensuring that each turn leaves the next one better equipped. The 2026 migration to NGSI-LD is not the end of the cycle: it is stage 01 again, now backed by ten more years of learning.
What repeats
Each stage generates information that feeds another. The flood digital twin grew out of evaluating the response to the 2019 DANA event; TuMurcia citizen reports improve maintenance routes that are later evaluated in turn.
What is never delegated
Ownership of the network, the data centres and the data model. This is the condition that allows everything else to be opened up without losing control of what is essential.
What is shared
Everything else: open data, APIs, digital twins and validated solutions, shared with the local community and other European cities.
Murcia's main asset is not what it has already built, but the capacity it has built to keep innovating.
Keep exploring