On June 17, at 12:00 PM, the DEEC TALK "21st Century Cities on 19th Century Infrastructure: A Paradigm in Disruption" will take place at the EAX auditorium. The session will feature Miguel Lima, founder of Bright Science, a company within the Arquiled group fully dedicated to R&D in Smart Cities technologies.

Abstract

The global urbanization process has reached a tipping point: today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban environments, with projections indicating that this figure will rise to around 70% by 2050. This rapid growth places unprecedented pressure on urban systems, whose functional complexity increases in a non-linear manner.

Paradoxically, much of the critical infrastructure that supports these systems—namely water supply networks, sanitation systems, and public lighting—continues to rely on design and operational paradigms that have remained essentially unchanged for over a century. This structural inertia results in significant operational inefficiencies, resource losses, and a limited ability to adapt to dynamic contexts.

This lecture will analyze two paradigmatic cases of urban infrastructure—water supply networks and public lighting systems—as a basis for discussing a contemporary approach grounded in their modeling and digitalization.

From these examples, four key dimensions will be explored:

• Data collection as the foundation for informed management;
• Identification of first-order efficiency gains resulting from monitoring and control;
• Spatiotemporal data analysis as a tool for systemic understanding and decision support;
• The emerging role of artificial intelligence in operational optimization and the transition toward predictive models.

Finally, the discussion will address the impacts of this approach in terms of sustainability, resource efficiency, and long-term urban planning, framing the potential of these technologies in the evolution toward more resilient and intelligent cities.

About the Speaker

Miguel Allen Lima has a vast experience in  Energy,  IT and Telecom industrys where from more than 13 years worked in the ONI Group, deeply connected to the onset of the Next Generation Networks (NGN) in Portugal, as CIO of ONI Telecom, and later as CEO of Hubgrade, a telecom integrator and of Knewon, a cloud services company.

In 2014 was appointed CEO of Arquiled, for a company turnaround, leading it to a top market position in the LED Street Light business. In 2018 founded Bright Science, an Arquiled company fully dedicated to R&D in Smart Cities technologies.

MSc (Master of Science) in Electrical Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon and with an MBA from AESE, University of Navarra, is also an amateur musician and keen traveler and sailor in his spare times.