Are Smart Cities becoming a reality with Internet of Everything?

Our planet is now urbanized. In the words of Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary General, we now live in the ‘urban century’.

In the 20^th century, only 1 in every 10 people lived in urban areas. It was in 2008 that the world’s population crossed the line of being more than 50% urban, which is projected to reach 75% by 2050. While this could fuel economic growth, rapid urbanization will heavily stress infrastructure in cities, given higher demands for transportation, water, energy, housing, healthcare et al. With finite resources, limited budgets, demographic shifts and climate change concerns, cities will need to use innovative technologies strategically, to achieve urban efficiency and improve quality of living, and most importantly make it economically and environmentally sustainable.

What makes a Smart City?

There is no tipping point after which a city using ICT can be termed ‘smart’. However, I’ve listed some solutions that can increase a city’s urban performance and smartness quotient, by optimizing use of natural resources, improving cost efficiencies and managing infrastructure that keeps cities running smoothly.

Smart City Concept – Source: DefenseForumIndia.com

Energy

• Intelligent and weather adaptive street lighting
• Smart energy meters in homes and businesses to regulate energy consumption
• Homes feeding any excess solar energy harvested into smart electric grid

Transportation

• Smart traffic management by discovering emergency routes and intelligently rerouting traffic in case of adverse climate conditions, accidents or traffic jams using smart billboards
• Monitoring vehicle and pedestrian levels to optimize driving routes, traffic lights and installation of overhead walkways
• Monitoring of parking spaces and providing drivers assistance in locating an empty slot

Safety & Security

• Video surveillance solutions to monitor crime levels, and automatic-sense-and-respond capabilities to prevent or contain natural disaster damages, and improve evacuation/police/ambulance/fire service response
• Monitoring of vibrations and material conditions in buildings, bridges and historical monuments

Waste

• Detection of waste type and fill levels in containers to optimize trash collection routes and methods
• Automated tunneling of waste to compost plans in multi-tenant dwelling units
• Automation of waste segregation and treatment plants

Water

• Detection of water leaks using sensors and pipe pressure variation, to fix aging infrastructure
• Monitoring water quality to ensure optimum level of chemicals used to treat water, and detection of impurities
• Smart water meters for better gauging consumption levels
• Storm water and waste water treatment plants

Air

• Monitoring of pollutants and radiation levels in manufacturing and nuclear zones, to generate leakage alerts and avert health threats to local citizens
• Monitoring noise levels in school, hospital and central zones

Internet-of-Everything for Cities

Traditionally, cities have built infrastructure silos to address transportation, energy, water, safety, waste management and similar needs. Also, vertical specific IT infrastructure management solutions were deployed to reap technology benefits. However such independent solutions rule out the possibility of sharing information, intelligence and IT resources across various city infrastructure, stunting the potential to scale and keep up with growing urban population.

In the Smart City context, IoE will serve as a digital overlay to unify city infrastructure, its people, things and data. IoE is not a single technology, but rather a concept. Just like the Internet, the Internet of Everything (IoE) would come alive as a system that can provide Smart City services, once the stack of ICT hardware and software intelligence is added to the underlying physical infrastructure, to enable P2M (people-to-machine) and M2M (machine-to-machine) communication.

In a larger context, IoE is thought of as the confluence of consumer, business and industrial internet, and thus can enable P2P (people-to-people), P2M and M2M communications. IoE connects people, data, things, and processes in networks of billions of automatic connections, unlike today where one must proactively connect to the network and to one another, via personal devices and social media to gather information. These automatic connections would create vast amounts of data, which when analyzed (either in information-gathering end devices or fog computing nodes) and used intelligently can allow for real-time decision making, and thus have boundless applications including Smart City solutions listed in the previous section.

IoE Architecture for Smart Cities

So, for a Smart City to be built, what are the various components that need to come together?

Smart City OS is the virtual application platform that aggregates open innovations from businesses and individual citizens (e.g. Smart City apps built using intelligence from the Digital Cloud on which it runs), and serve as the ‘operations center’ for public services.

The Digital Cloud denotes the cloud platform (with embedded SW & HW) that aggregates intelligence spanning multiple usecases of Smart Cities, and more widely across IoE applications, namely Smart Homes, Smart Transport (V2X applications), Smart Industry, Smart Health and Smart Living/Entertainment, that could benefit from composite information. Having a national digital grid for various IoE applications could help tap into gestalt effect benefits. A high-speed communications network built on fiber-optic and WiFi backbone network, will serve as the hardware platform that moves data from smart objects  and sensors for aggregation in the Digital Cloud.

Sensor/Machine infrastructure will be formed of existing physical infrastructure equipped with wired/wireless sensors and M2M devices, to enable detection and notification of events to the higher layers in the IoE architecture.

IoE for Cities – Architectural Framework; Source Cisco.com

My understanding is that existing CAM (Cloud/Analytics/Mobility) technologies are ready to power up the ‘Digital Grid’ in the above architecture and make it functional today, though the complexities of a large-scale national deployment are yet to be understood.

The key challenge would be in identifying cost-effective, scalable and interoperable technology solutions to build the Sensor/Machine infrastructure, and ensuring raw/filtered data flows through to the Digital Grid. As can be expected, considerable work needs to be done to actualize the operations center, ‘Smart City OS’.

Smart City Pilot Projects

According to a BBC news article, IBM had nearly 2500 smart city projects around the world in 2013. Few governments that the company had worked with, on Smart City initiatives, are Dublin (parking), Dubuque (water), Rio (traffic), Singapore (traffic), Stockholm (traffic) and California (traffic). There have also been citizen/academia led initiatives as those in New York (rain water/sewage) and London (pollution, weather, river levels) where the local government opened up city data to the public, or Kickstarter Air Quality Egg project led by Pachube (now Xively) which deploys its own sensing network globally, to gather air quality data. While pilot projects in existing cities have focused on specific applications, new cities have been successful in testing and deploying more comprehensive Smart City solutions.

Over the years, infrastructure has gotten smarter in existing cities, as retrofitting smart tech into existing infrastructure has been going on for a while now, in just about every main city around the world – Barcelona, Copenhagen, Vienna, Manchester, Paris, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Seattle, Orlando, Dublin, London, Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, Sofia, Johannesburg, Singapore, Hong Kong, Santiago de Chile, Mexico City, Bogota – to name a few that I specifically came across online, in this context.

Significant Greenfield Projects

In Asia-Pacific and Middle East, there have been a number of greenfield projects, with Songdo in South Korea and Masdar in UAE being the best known examples. In such greenfield projects, deployment of the ICT infrastructure is planned into the city’s construction from the beginning, allowing for systems to be integrated.

Work has been underway since 2004, on the $35B project termed Songdo International Business District, a 1500-acre new city in South Korea targeted to accommodate 15,000 smart homes, 65,000 residents and 300,000 commuters by 2018. The city boasts of a pneumatic system that funnels garbage to its waste-energy generation plant, and ICT infrastructure that allows for better monitoring of energy use, traffic, water and waste, apart from remote healthcare, virtual concierge, intelligent tutoring services made possible through high quality video communication infrastructure. With 33,000 residents so far, the capital energy use in Songdo is on average 40% lower than any existing city of comparable scale. It is reported that the developer charges a premium for these homes given its sustainability features. And so, in such private projects, affordability will be the key for smart cities to be socially accepted and become the norm.

High-tech solar-powered Masdar City in UAE, which is claimed to be the world’s first sustainable city, set out to prove that cities can be sustainable even in environmental conditions as harsh as its deserts. The city is managed by the Abu Dhabi government via a subsidiary, and it boasts of green educational and business districts with driverless electric vehicles, reduced demand for air conditioning, movement sensors replacing light switches and taps, clean air etc. However, it had come under fire for being sparely populated because of lack of affordable housing. It is expected to break ground soon with 500 smart private homes which will grow upto 2000 homes, 40000 residents and 50000 workers at a price tag of $15-18B.

PlanIT Valley near Porto, Portugal is yet another smart city that would be built ground up by Living PlanIT with smart technologies from various vendors, and its own Urban Operating System (UOS) to manage daily processes and gather data from smart sensors deployed throughout the city. This smart city development has been classified as a Project of National Interest (PIN) and is backed by the local government, while Living PlanIT’s founders themselves own the land and fund it.

Panasonic developed Fujisawa SST (Sustainable Smart Town) in Japan is aimed at showcasing renewable (solar) energy generation while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and cutting water use. The smart town continues to grow its resident base, as it develops its infrastructure to house 1000 households, when the project completes in 2018. The city manages its energy needs in real time by coordinating data from sensors linked to home appliances.

Does it pay to invest in Smart Cities?

Every greenfield smart city project, be it Songdo/Masdar/Fujisawa SST, has resulted in substantial environmental benefits through energy/water savings and reduced carbon emissions. However, there have been limited disclosures on profitability and TCO savings of such greenfield ventures and assumed lifespan for these calculations.

In comparison, ROI has been captured and made public for brownfield smart city projects. For e.g., Smart garbage solution in Finland brought down waste collection costs by 30%; smart lighting solution in UK resulted in 7% crime reduction without additional manpower investments; immersive video conferencing in USA lowered travel expenses by 15%. In addition, digitization is seen to fuel GDP growth and lower unemployment rate through job creation.

Given steady demographic shifts toward an aging population in major economies, Smart City initiatives could help lower workforce costs by automating City Infrastructure Management (CIM). Also, CIM maintenance activities could potentially be outsourced to other countries around the world, as they can be remotely managed.

So, are Smart Cities becoming a reality with IoE?

Well, given significant pilot efforts around the globe, I’d say that we’ve now entered the era of Smart Cities. How soon it touches us depends on where you or I live in the world!

I started exploring this topic, as we’d soon be hosting a panel discussion, on ‘Realizing the vision of Smart Cities in India’, in a local industry conference. The field of smart technologies and IoE/IoT is certainly buzzing with activity, given entrepreneurial efforts and industry cum government initiatives such as IoT Living Lab in Electronic City, 100 Smart Cities in India, Digital India, etc.

This Smart City intro post was mostly focused on aspects of environmental sciences [subject seemed to lack zing and certainly not my cup of tea!]. Let me now get back to my IT roots and explore underlying IoE technologies beyond Cloud-Analytics-Mobile-Social, their maturity level, industry standardization efforts, affordability factor and thus how far/close we are to widespread adoption.

[And there goes my last bit of resolve to limit post lengths. Well, my blog posts are anyways intended to capture a well-rounded perspective on what is going on in a technology area/market segment, rather than border on technology journalism.]

Will be back with more details, on IoE efforts around the globe or more closer home to make world’s cities smarter, as I prep up for the panel discussion in the coming weeks.