TALQ Ten Event: 10 Years of Setting Smart City Standards

Published on 2022-07-06

The TALQ Consortium celebrates its 10th anniversary and starts collaboration with DOLL Living Lab

The TALQ Consortium celebrated its 10th anniversary with a smart city conference at the DOLL Living Lab in Copenhagen, Denmark, end of June. Two keynote speeches were given by representatives of the City of Copenhagen and the former Street Lighting Manager of Brussels, Belgium. About 50 guests from various countries flew in to meet with other smart city experts. During the event a reciprocal partnership between DOLL Living Lab and the TALQ Consortium was also announced.

TALQ was founded in 2012, originally with the scope to define a standard protocol for smart outdoor lighting. In 2017 the decision was taken to extend the software protocol for use between Central Management Systems and generic Outdoor Devices Networks (ODN), beyond street lighting, to enable compatibility between systems from different verticals. In the meantime, the TALQ Framework has proven to be a suitable framework to encourage interoperability between various smart city applications, such as lighting, parking, traffic control, environmental services and waste management. It supports cities in their investment decisions and saves them from vendor lock in.

Learnings of live installations at the TALQ Ten Event
The TALQ Ten Event was organized as a conference with workshop format, to discuss openly the experiences with the protocol standard in use. It was complemented by a guided tour of DOLL’s outdoor facilities to see various smart city applications in operation.
The keynote speakers were two smart city experts working for public entities with vast experience in the field. Stine Lisbjerg, City Lighting Coordinator in Copenhagen reported on the purpose and results but also about the challenges of putting TALQ into operation. Bénédicte Collard - previously in charge of all activities linked to streetlighting for the 19 Brussels municipalities at Sibelga and since 2021, head of modernization of streetlight LUWA 4.0 and Technical Director at Luminus Cities – summarized the ‘lessons learned’ in rolling out a TALQ-compliant solution realised by various vendors in Brussels. Furthermore, she reported on the needs and particular requests when working on an ambitious project for connected highways, and upcoming trends in the smart city environment.

Other presentations and the discussions underlined the need for open platforms and formats like DOLL Living Lab and the TALQ Consortium to exchange and create interoperability between systems of different vendors worldwide and to broaden the choice of future proof systems for cities and communities on all continents. “The positive feedback regarding our efforts and the large interest shown in our TALQ Ten Event really touched us as non-profit-organization. It’s great to witness the impact of our standard on public entities and to see TALQ as a requirement in ever more smart city tenders around the world.” stated Simon Dunkley, Secretary General of the TALQ Consortium.
“We are very excited to initiate a strong partnership together with the TALQ Consortium, where DOLL Living Lab and TALQ become mutual partners of each organization. A clear overlap working with outdoor lighting and smart city company partners present promising opportunities and complements our common work and ambition to create and demonstrate next level of interoperability in the industry.” adds Teddy Sibbern Axelsen, Head of DOLL Living Lab.

Entire press release (pdf) in English