Ralf-Martin Soe

Tallinn University of Technology | TTU

It has become a recurring necessity and exercise for corporations to assess the alignment of their corporate strategy and goals with UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Such an assessment is a highly complex task, full of inconsistencies and subjective opinions of internal and external stakeholders, which eventually influences the formal proce...

This study investigated smart city initiatives and challenges faced by small to medium sized municipalities. The literature on smart cities is dominated by findings from large cities yet, both large and small municipalities are expected to contribute towards the fulfillment of the United Nation’s 17 sustainable development goals. A mixed method was...

The energy sector is digitalizing - we see a lot of smart energy services providing higher value to customers through data processing, which also increases the importance of transparency and security of data access and processing. Nevertheless, the widespread use of these services is lagging behind for enabling fundamental transitions of energy sys...

Innovation in mobility is proceeding at a fast pace, the future disrupting technologies ranging from automation and connectivity to micro-mobility and electric propulsion. This research effort is justified by the impressive array of challenges that urban centres will face in the following decades, such as the ageing population, urbanization and pol...

Environmental awareness and technological advancements for self-driving cars are close to making autonomous vehicles (AV) a reality in everyday scenarios and a part of smart cities’ transportation systems. The perception of safety and trust towards AVs of passengers and other agents in the urban scenario, being pedestrians, cyclists, scooter driver...

This paper investigates on long-term challenges faced by local governments. Using empirical evidence from Estonia, this paper aims to help fill a research gap in that there is a lack of a systematic approach on how to analyze common urban challenges via direct involvement of local governments. In terms of conceptual framework, a unique combination...

As a network of connected sensors to transform data into knowledge, Urban Platforms have been rooted in several smart city projects. However, this has often resulted in them being no more than IoT dashboards. More recently, there has been an increased interest in supporting the data governance and distributed architecture of Urban Platforms in orde...

Autonomous solutions for transportation are emerging worldwide, and one of the sectors that will benefit the most from these solutions is the public transport by shifting toward the new paradigm of Mobility as a Service (MaaS). Densely populated areas cannot afford an increase in individual transportation due to space limitation, congestion, and po...

By exploring and defining characteristics of a smart city research and innovation centre, we contribute to the discussion on smart city development capacity. To do so, using a qualitative method, we review definitions of the concept and map international groups and institutes affiliated with this domain. Our main result is an overview of global res...

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are moving from test areas to the streets, which is one of the key components of smart cities and the future of mobility as a service (MaaS). In 2020, two AV services were operated in Tallinn. This paper focuses on one of these services, and its set-up process. The pilot project took place in Ülemiste City, a tech park wit...

Autonomous driving is becoming increasingly popular worldwide. Currently, there is a high number of successful use cases and pilot projects around the world, but the market solutions are limited to restricted areas and advanced driving assistance systems. The main reason is the challenging shift from simulation and test tracks to the real world, wh...

This paper is interested in the interplay between smart governance and urban mobility planning in the context of smart city. Mobility is one of the key urban domains, thus, it is crucial to analyze the governance models behind it, especially from two perspectives: participation of stakeholders and decision-making procedures. More specifically, this...

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are entering from test areas to the streets, which is one of the key components of smart cities and the future of mobility as a service (Maas). In 2020, two AV services were operated in Tallinn. This paper focuses on one of the services, including how it was set up. The route was set up in Ülemiste City, a tech park with 1...

The main interest of this paper is to analyze the gap between an existing city and its future vision set in the strategy, with a focus on the transition path towards becoming a Smart City. For the analyses, we used the example of Tallinn, a middle-sized European capital city acknowledged in innovation reports as a good example of a Smart City devel...

The rapid development of intelligent control techniques has brought changes to the automotive industry and led to the development of autonomous or self-driving vehicles. This paper presents self-driving autonomous vehicle (AV) shuttles in the smart city context and discusses different aspects necessary to consider when deploying AV shuttles. The sm...

The main interest of this paper is to analyze the mobility acceptance factors of an automated shuttle bus last-mile service. There is limited research on the passengers’ perception of security and safety of automated mobility, whereas prior research is mostly based on surveys interested in attitudes towards self-driving vehicles, without being link...

This chapter aims to develop an empirical roadmap for the public sector on how to implement automated transport in the urban context. This is a theory-driven and empirics-tested approach, meaning that innovation concepts and smart city frameworks will be mapped with examples from the real-life urban cases. It is expected that smart city aims to sol...

Urban transportation in the next few decades will shift worldwide toward electrification and automation, with the final aim of increasing energy efficiency and safety for passengers. Such a big change requires strong collaboration and efforts among public administration, research and stakeholders in developing, testing and promoting these technolog...

Urban transportation in the next few decades will shift worldwide towards electrification and automation, with the final aim of increasing energy efficiency and safety for passengers. Such a big change requires strong collaboration and efforts among public administration, research and stakeholders in developing, testing and promoting these technolo...

Urban transportation in the next few decades will shift worldwide towards electrification and automation, with the final aim of increasing energy efficiency and safety for passengers. Such a big change requires strong collaboration and efforts among public administration, research and stakeholders in developing, testing and promoting these technolo...

This thesis analyses the rising phenomena of smart cities in the case of two Northern- European cities: Helsinki and Tallinn, and it is interested in how cities can become smart jointly. In general, the administrative and legal set-up of cities has a strong tendency to be horizontal, with digital innovations introduced in isolation. This vertical d...

This paper introduces a new dimension to conceptualising smart cities - a cross-border approach for heterogeneous cities. There is a mutual agreement between smart city scholars that cities are smart when they reduce silos and enable better flow of data between city functions and services. This paper focuses on the cross-border aspect of smart citi...

This paper discusses how local governments can team up for joint service provision, be more adaptive towards new technological and organisational changes and introduce novel services following main industry trends (e.g. predictive analytics, autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence). The conceptual approach is to use Public Value (PV) as the...

This project will demonstrate how ICT-based solutions can contribute to saving energy by motivating behavioural change of energy end-users. The project will demonstrate how energy service providers can be more open (involvement of end-users and other energy market participants) and innovative (open living lab concept for co-creation and co-design p...

In general, most smart city researchers agree that population growth is driving the need for smart cities but there is very limited, if any, conceptual and empirical cases that explain the role of demographics (and ageing) as a driver of smart cities and its effect on future urban healthcare costs. This research paper proposes a new conceptual fram...

The FINEST Twins aims to build a smart-city Center of Excellence (CoE) based in Estonia capable of mobilising all leading actors and stakeholders in Estonia and establish a solid long term partnership with their Helsinki region counterparts, capitalising on the macro region's scientific knowledge, innovativeness and entrepreneurship. The smart city...

This paper looks into how cities can offer joint digital services in the cross-border areas. By fact, most digital services are local and by large, most of them are developed in isolation from the neighbouring local governments, either national or international. In the digital area, this is a huge challenge, as independently developed digital servi...