ACCUS — Gdansk’s OS for the Smart City

Almost everybody has heard about the smart city and modern technologies improving quality of live in cities: monitoring traffic and pollution, saving energy, delivering state-of-the-art digital services to citizens. But quite often various city systems are developed separately, just for one purpose. They don’t cooperate, don’t exchange data and don’t support open data formats, since their development is restricted by legal licenses.

The issue of critical importance for every city is to build synergies of various city ICT systems cooperating and exchanging data.

And this is not an easy task, while every city has a lot of ICT solutions and standards already working, that not always are compatibile. In Gdansk there is a team which took a risk of better integration of the city systems. What they knew from the beginning, was the fact the city needed an operating system for the city, integrating different data streams, which would make creating new applications easier, faster, and cheaper. The openness of the system was important criterion, while the team saw this as an opportunity to build an ecosystem of unviersities, companies, coders and activists creating their own solutions with the use of city data.

The ambitious task of creating ACCUS (Adaptive Cooperative Control in Urban Systems) was taken by an international consortium of universities and ICT companies, with the strong support of Gdansk local government. Among 28 partners there were Gdansk University of Technology and universities from Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Holland, Spain and Portugal. Key European players, like Thales, Inabensa, Acciona and CPL provided cross-application context, and many other companies supported the project with their expertise on smart systems, embedded system development and security issues.

“ACCUS aims to provide an integration and coordination platform for urban systems in order to optimize their combined performance, thus achieving more flexible, more efficient, safer and more robust integrated urban systems and managing their emergent behaviors” — is the goal set by the consortium for ACCUS.

But let’s get into details. What exactly systems are integrated on ACCUS? It’s worth mentioning a few of them:

• Tristar (Intelligent Transportation System in the Tricity), providing with data on traffic to make city traffic smoother;
• Real-time Air Pollution Monitoring;
• DART subsystem responsible for emergency situation management;
• Virtual Weather subsystem that will provide detailed forecasts for the Pomerania Region updated 4 times a day with 1km grid size;
• Intelligent Street Traffic Radars subsystem will provide information on street traffic (cars, bicycles and pedestrians) through sensors of various kinds;
• Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) subsystem for the identification of vehicles and infrastructure control;
• City Activity Stream — responsible for two way communication between urban ecosystem and citizens (information and news feed, citizen-sensing);
• Energy Usage Application for optimization of energy usage in smart house installation;
• 3D GIS Tool for visualization of data stored in city GIS system.

Taking part in ACCUS project is an experiment for the city of Gdansk, but we were fully aware to agree to that. If all goes well, we will be able to offer the system to other local governments in Pomerania and in Poland — said the Mayor of Gdansk Paweł Adamowicz.

Just imagine how many exciting possibilities will appear when the above-mentioned data will available to software developers! Mobile applications for better navigation, tools for urban planning, smarter use of resources, for example: adjusting lighting to traffic volume on a street or real-time updates on weather (maybe there is no need to water a garden, when a rain is soon to come?) and many more.

As for today, the pilot phase of the ACCUS stage is coming to an end. The next step would be moving to using the platform on a daily basis, in applications serving city residents, scientists, officials, entrepreneurs. Let’s hope it would come soon.

Written by: Krzysztof Garski/Mayor’s Office in Gdańsk

Based on data from http://projectaccus.eu/