Société du Grand Paris and IMT have signed a partnership agreement

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Société du Grand Paris (SGP) and IMT (IMT) have joined forces on the Grand Paris Express digital project that has the potential to transform Grand Paris into a smart, sustainable and innovative metropolis.

The most digital underground in the world

Following three years of collaborative thinking involving 170 of Grand Paris’[1] private, public and voluntary stakeholders (including IMT), Société du Grand Paris is seeking to make the Grand Paris Express ‘the most digital metro in the world’, serving Grand Paris – a 21st century capital city. It aims to offer an astonishing underground transport experience for travelers, providing permanent access to their full range of collaborative services, while offering French-Tech startups an open database for testing on an unprecedented scale, and providing the Capital region with optical links and datacenters for decades to come.

Société du Grand Paris and IMT, which has more than 10,000 engineering students and managers and nearly 3,000 university lecturers, researchers and postgraduates in its 13 world-class institutions, are now joining forces to design the architecture and dimension the digital infrastructure of the Grand Paris Express.

A strategy for pooling and valuation

The two organizations will develop a method to measure the impact of a large digital project on economic development and employment in the region. They will prepare a data exploitation and sharing strategy capable of meeting the challenges of a global metropolis in the 21st century.

Société du Grand Paris is offering IMT unparalleled opportunities for scientific research and technological experimentation and a wide range of innovative and collaborative projects. The ‘Inventons la Métropole du Grand Paris’ call for projects on sites made available and then sold by local authorities in Ile de France is a concrete illustration of these opportunities.

According to Philippe Yvin, Chairman of the Société du Grand Paris Board: “Grand Paris Express is establishing itself as an economic and technological accelerator. Société du Grand Paris is building a network that will be essential to the city and adapted to digital society. It will be the most digitally advanced underground transport system in the world, which does not just follow the social and digital changes, but actually makes them all possible, as everything that is connected will be transformed. I am delighted that Société du Grand Paris will be working with IMT and thus collaborating with the most prestigious French engineering schools in the telecom and mining sectors. Grand Paris Express is the metro for future generations and we must involve the younger generation – particularly young French engineers – in everything we do.”

Société du Grand Paris will benefit from IMT’s scientific and technical input and from its expertise in forecasting, innovation, and experimentation with infrastructures, data and digital services.

Francis Jutand, IMT’s deputy director considers that “Grand Paris Express forms part of a strategy of anticipating the needs of a smart, humane and sustainable global megacity within the next 10 to 20 years. The speed at which technology and its uses is evolving, the need for smart mobility and traffic management, as well as environmental and quality of life constraints, should all be taken into account simultaneously. The Institut, along with its institutions, researchers and students, is proud to be helping to rise to the challenge of creating an innovative, scalable and efficient digital service infrastructure.”

Areas of collaboration

  • Scientific and technical research on the dimensioning, the architecture and technical characteristics of the digital infrastructures (fiberoptics, mobile telephony, Wifi, geolocation and Datacenters) that will be deployed in work on the Grand Paris Express. This research will incorporate usage changes, operator and business requirements, technological development prospects and standardization issues.
  • Research into business models for massive personal digital data schemes and experimentation on open and shared data platforms.
  • Forecasting and anticipation concerning connected objects and sensors likely to be used by future generations and the issue of their integration into the Grand Paris Express.
  • “Feasibility demonstration” or “proof of concept”-type experimentation for infrastructure, connected objects or sensors that are of interest to the Grand Paris Express.
  • Partnerships for French or European calls for research projects in the connected mobility or smart and sustainable city sectors.
  • Collaboration in the context of IMT research chairs covering one of the possible actions of the digital project, e.g. personal data, or creation of a new chair.

Download the Press release in PDF

¹ List of Société du Grand Paris partners who are involved in the digital project appendix