Smart Cities Transforming the 21st century city via the creative use of technology
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ARUP, 2010
Cities are real-time systems, but rarely run as such. In the past many have used Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to improve performance at a departmental level including mobility, utilities, community and eGovernment services. In these cities “smart technologies” are creating more efficient systems and better informed citizens.
Now leading cities have started to push this concept further. They are exploring how smart cities can add value within a strategic framework. This will mean moving from departmental solutions to a city wide approach, creating economies of scale and scope that will result in: economic development and the creation of jobs; promoting resource efficiency and mitigating climate change; providing a greater place to live and work; running cities more efficiently; and supporting communities.
The smart city describes a step-change in both intensity and extent of connection, in that almost all aspects of infrastructure—from transit networks to energy, waste and water; from housing to street trees—can wirelessly broadcast their state and activity in real-time through the use of robust, cheap and discreet sensors. This concept is known as ‘the internet of things’, in which almost every inanimate object can become aware to some degree. As with contemporary engine control systems, smart urban infrastructure can tirelessly watch its own operation, predicting faults before they occur, optimising delivery of resources or services to match demand.
Download documentSmarter Cities
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IBM, 2011
The Smarter City is an interactive experience that helps visualize how cities can become smarter through the interconnection of data, instrumentation of systems and intelligence gained from analytics. With insight from more 2,000 smarter cities projects, IBM has developed the expertise and capabilities to help cities of all sizes become smarter. The experience demonstrates IBM s leadership in the government industry and shows how IBM can help transform complex systems such as transportation, public safety, energy consumption, education, healthcare and economic development.
Go to webpageIntelligent City Car
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Media Lab’s Smart Cities
The new intelligence of cities resides in the increasingly effective combination of digital telecommunication networks (the nerves), ubiquitously embedded intelligence (the brains), sensors and tags (the sensory organs), and software (the knowledge and cognitive competence). This does not exist in isolation from other urban systems, or connected to them only through human intermediaries. There is a growing web of direct connections to the mechanical and electrical systems of buildings, household appliances, production machinery, process plants, transportation systems, electrical grids and other energy supply networks, water supply and waste removal networks, systems that provide life safety and security, and management systems for just about every imaginable human activity. Furthermore, the cross-connections among these systems —both horizontal and vertical— are growing.
City Car promises very high levels of personal mobility at low cost, and effectively complements transit systems by, among other things, efficiently solving the “last mile” problem. This project illustrates the growing potential of ubiquitously embedded intelligence and networking to revolutionize the ways we design and operate buildings and cities. The crucial enabling technology of the City Car is an omnidirectional robot wheel that has been developed. This wheel contains an electric drive motor, suspension, steering, and braking. It is fully drive-by-wire, with just an electric cable and a data cable going in, and there is a simple, snap-on mechanical connection to the chassis.
This highly modularized vehicle architecture, together with elimination of the traditional engine and drive train, offers great flexibility in design of the body and interior. It has taken advantage of this to create small, lightweight passenger vehicles that fold and stack like shopping carts at the supermarket or luggage carts at the airport. The independent, omnidirectional wheels provide extraordinary maneuverability; cars can spin on their own wheelbases instead of making u-turns, and can parallel park by slipping in sideways. Depending upon context, it can parked six to eight folded and stacked City Cars in one traditional parking space.
Although City Cars can work quite nicely as privately owned vehicles, they provide the greatest sustainability benefits when they are integrated into citywide, intelligently coordinated, shared-use mobility systems. The idea is to locate stacks of city cars at major origin and destination points, such as transit stops, airports, hotels, apartment buildings, supermarkets, convenience stores, universities, hospitals, and so on. You just swipe a credit card, drive a vehicle away from the front of the stack, and return it to the rear of another stack at your final
Smart Buildings
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ICT for Sustainable Growth Unit, Information Society and Media Directorate-General, European Commission, July 2009
According to the European Union Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings (EPBD 2002/91/EC), more than 40% of the energy consumption in Europe is due to heating, cooling and lighting operations within buildings. Moreover, buildings are the largest source of CO2 emissions in the EU15 (including their electric power consumption), and their total energy consumption has been rising since 1990. As such, construction stakeholders need to deal with new challenges including addressing construction from the viewpoint of sustainable development – energy effi ciency and decrease of GHG emissions, improved innovation in the built environment for better comfort and safety.
European citizens have become increasingly sensitive to environmental issues. Supported by legislation and incentives (often at the local level), citizens and businesses alike have taken the initiative to better insulate homes and buildings, to better monitor and control their energy performance, and to avail of and install renewable energy sources such as solar panels and wind turbines. It is clear that if “green buildings” are to become commonplace, that this can only be facilitated by ICT.
Today, most of those who are charged with implementing energy efficient solutions are fl ying blind. Buildings - which account for 40% of energy end-use in the EU - provide a prime example. Building components (cement, steel, insulation, glass windows, coatings) and systems (lighting, heating, ventilation and air conditioning appliances) are developed by independent companies whose products are tested for individual performance independently of each other. While this must be encouraged and is necessary, it is insufficient. A whole building approach to the design and operation of buildings, where these components are integrated in a way that they reduce energy consumption through cooperation, is rarely used. This often leads to signifi cant systemlevel inefficiencies. The ICT sector can deliver simulation, modelling, analysis, monitoring and visualisation tools that are vitally needed to facilitate a whole building approach to both the design and operation of buildings.
The local hub of the energy control system is the Energy Management Device (EMD), which is an independent functional entity that conveys control logic for both active and stand-by appliances and energy management functions integrated through a multimode of communication interfaces with the home network. The EMD is controlled by the gateway, using a bus interface that grants access to multiple EMDs from a single access-point, either locally or remotely via an operator network. The EMD must have a unified architecture, which will feature generic interfaces towards the household appliances, the power network and the home network.
Achieving energy efficiency in housing
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Power House Europe (Project partly funded by European Commission – Intelligent Energy Europe Programme), 2010
Almost 1200 local cooperative and social housing organizations throughout the EU were asked what it would take to help them to radically reduce energy consumption and increase the use of renewable energy in the homes they build, own and manage. They were asked to outline what they perceive to be the key challenges and the main obstacles blocking progress in this field.
By way of example: New ICT based Neighbourhood Management Systems will allow peer-to-peer sharing of energy produced through re-newable schemes; New ICT based meters will allow households not only to buy but also to sell energy; and ICT will allow information on energy consumption of every energy-consuming appliance in a home or a building to be provided in real-time, in a user friendly way, thereby empowering citizens to take decisions that lead to energy savings.
A New Architecture for Reduction of Energy Consumption of Home Appliances
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The main innovation in managing the energy of household appliances is the bridge between home communication and power distribution networks with the aim to control the power distribution through communication services. Network operators may use the interfaces of the residential gateway to implement services for mobile and fixed terminals featuring remote energy monitoring and control of the home environment. Power distribution network operators have particular interest to monitor the energy consumed by large blocks of users on macroscopic level. Accessing households through such a system is an efficient and cost effective way of accomplishing such task.
Residential users may control their environment through the service interface of the gateway that is able to get connected with any type of home terminal, like e.g. wireless PDA, embedded devices, et.. Moreover, the system is able to collect additional information from the environment through a sensor network and create user profiles in order to perform a partially automatic configuration of the energy management policies. Home terminals distribute commands to the appropriate appliance via the Energy Management Device (EMD), affecting its energy consumption attributes.
