Smart City Concept and Services

According to Pike Research on Smart Cities,² the Smart City market is estimated at hundreds of billion dollars by 2020, with an annual spending reaching nearly 16 billions. This market springs from the synergic interconnection of key industry and service sectors, such as Smart Governance, Smart Mobility, Smart Utilities, Smart Buildings, and Smart Environment. These sectors have also been considered in the European Smart Citie to define a ranking criterion that can be used to assess the level of “smartness” of European cities. Nonetheless, the Smart City market has not really taken off yet, for a number of political, technical, and financial barriers .

Under the political dimension, the primary obstacle is the attribution of decision-making power to the different stakeholders. A possible way to remove this roadblock is to institutionalize the entire decision and execution process, concentrating the strategic planning and management of the smart city aspects into a single, dedicated department in the city .

On the technical side, the most relevant issue consists in the noninteroperability of the heterogeneous technologies currently used in city and urban developments. In this respect, the IoT vision can become the building block to realize a unified urban-scale ICT platform, thus unleashing the potential of the Smart City vision .

Finally, concerning the financial dimension, a clear business model is still lacking, although some initiative to fill this gap has been recently undertaken . The situation is worsened by the adverse global economic situation, which has determined a general shrinking of investments on public services. This situation prevents the potentially huge Smart City market from becoming reality. A possible way out of this impasse is to first develop those services that conjugate social utility with very clear return on investment, such as smart parking and smart buildings, and will hence act as catalyzers for the other added-value services .

In the rest of this section, we overview some of the services that might be enabled by an urban IoT paradigm and that are of potential interest in the Smart City context because they can realize the win–win situation of increasing the quality and enhancing the services offered to the citizens while bringing an economical advantage for the city administration in terms of reduction of the operational costs . To better appreciate the level of maturity of the enabling technologies for these services, we report in Table I a synoptic view of the services in terms of suggested type(s) of network to be deployed, expected traffic generated by the service, maximum tolerable delay, device powering, and an estimate of the feasibility of each service with currently available technologies. From the table, it clearly emerges that, in general, the practical realization of most of such services is not hindered by technical issues, but rather by the lack of a widely accepted communication and service architecture that can abstract from the specific features of the single technologies and provide harmonized access to the services.

Structural Health of Buildings: Proper maintenance of the historical buildings of a city requires the continuous monitoring of the actual conditions of each building and identification of the areas that are most subject to the impact of external agents. The urban IoT may provide a distributed database of building structural integrity measurements, collected by suitable sensors located in the buildings, such as vibration and deformation sensors to monitor the building stress, atmospheric agent sensors in the surrounding areas to monitor pollution levels, and temperature and humidity sensors to have a complete characterization of the environmental conditions . This database should reduce the need for expensive periodic structural testing by human operators and will allow targeted and proactive maintenance and restoration actions. Finally, it will be possible to combine vibration and seismic readings in order to better study and understand the impact of light earthquakes on city buildings. This database can be made publicly accessible in order to make the citizens aware of the care taken in preserving the city historical heritage. The practical realization of this service, however, requires the installation of sensors in the buildings and surrounding areas and their interconnection to a control system, which may require an initial investment in order to create the needed infrastructure.

Waste Management: Waste management is a primary issue in many modern cities, due to both the cost of the service and the problem of the storage of garbage in landfills. A deeper penetration of ICT solutions in this domain, however, may result in significant savings and economical and ecological advantages. For instance, the use of intelligent waste containers, which detect the level of load and allow for an optimization of the collector trucks route, can reduce the cost of waste collection and improve the quality of recycling . To realize such a smart waste management service, the IoT shall connect the end devices, i.e., intelligent waste containers, to a control center where an optimization software processes the data and determines the optimal management of the collector truck fleet.

Air Quality: The European Union officially adopted a 20-20-20 Renewable Energy Directive setting climate change reduction goals for the next decade.⁴ The targets call for a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 compared with 1990 levels, a 20% cut in energy consumption through improved energy efficiency by 2020, and a 20% increase in the use of renewable energy by 2020. To such an extent, an urban IoT can provide means to monitor the quality of the air in crowded areas, parks, or fitness trails . In addition, communication facilities can be provided to let health applications running on joggers’ devices be connected to the infrastructure. In such a way, people can always find the healthiest path for outdoor activities and can be continuously connected to their preferred personal training application. The realization of such a service requires that air quality and pollution sensors be deployed across the city and that the sensor data be made publicly available to citizens.

Noise Monitoring: Noise can be seen as a form of acoustic pollution as much as carbon oxide (CO) is for air. In that sense, the city authorities have already issued specific laws to reduce the amount of noise in the city centre at specific hours. An urban IoT can offer a noise monitoring service to measure the amount of noise produced at any given hour in the places that adopt the service . Besides building a space-time map of the noise pollution in the area, such a service can also be used to enforce public security, by means of sound detection algorithms that can recognize, for instance, the noise of glass crashes or brawls. This service can hence improve both the quiet of the nights in the city and the confidence of public establishment owners, although the installation of sound detectors or environmental microphones is quite controversial, because of the obvious privacy concerns for this type of monitoring.

Traffic Congestion: On the same line of air quality and noise monitoring, a possible Smart City service that can be enabled by urban IoT consists in monitoring the traffic congestion in the city. Even though camera-based traffic monitoring systems are already available and deployed in many cities, low-power widespread communication can provide a denser source of information. Traffic monitoring may be realized by using the sensing capabilities and GPS installed on modern vehicles , and also adopting a combination of air quality and acoustic sensors along a given road. This information is of great importance for city authorities and citizens: for the former to discipline traffic and to send officers where needed and for the latter to plan in advance the route to reach the office or to better schedule a shopping trip to the city centre.

City Energy Consumption: Together with the air quality monitoring service, an urban IoT may provide a service to monitor the energy consumption of the whole city, thus enabling authorities and citizens to get a clear and detailed view of the amount of energy required by the different services (public lighting, transportation, traffic lights, control cameras, heating/cooling of public buildings, and so on). In turn, this will make it possible to identify the main energy consumption sources and to set priorities in order to optimize their behavior. This goes in the direction indicated by the European directive for energy efficiency improvement in the next years. In order to obtain such a service, power draw monitoring devices must be integrated with the power grid in the city. In addition, it will also be possible to enhance these service with active functionalities to control local power production structures (e.g., photovoltaic panels).

Smart Parking: The smart parking service is based on road sensors and intelligent displays that direct motorists along the best path for parking in the city. The benefits deriving from this service are manifold: faster time to locate a parking slot means fewer CO emission from the car, lesser traffic congestion, and happier citizens. The smart parking service can be directly integrated in the urban IoT infrastructure, because many companies in Europe are providing market products for this application. Furthermore, by using short-range communication technologies, such as Radio Frequency Identifiers (RFID) or Near Field Communication (NFC), it is possible to realize an electronic verification system of parking permits in slots reserved for residents or disabled, thus offering a better service to citizens that can legitimately use those slots and an efficient tool to quickly spot violations.

Smart Lighting: In order to support the 20-20-20 directive, the optimization of the street lighting efficiency is an important feature. In particular, this service can optimize the street lamp intensity according to the time of the day, the weather condition, and the presence of people. In order to properly work, such a service needs to include the street lights into the Smart City infrastructure. It is also possible to exploit the increased number of connected spots to provide WiFi connection to citizens. In addition, a fault detection system will be easily realized on top of the street light controllers.

Automation and Salubrity of Public Buildings: Another important application of IoT technologies is the monitoring of the energy consumption and the salubrity of the environment in public buildings (schools, administration offices, and museums) by means of different types of sensors and actuators that control lights, temperature, and humidity. By controlling these parameters, indeed, it is possible to enhance the level of comfort of the persons that live in these environments, which may also have a positive return in terms of productivity, while reducing the costs for heating/cooling .

WRITTEN BY:

BHAWNA SACHDEVA

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

ECE DEPARTMENT