Smart City Analytics To Seize Opportunities

The term “Smart City” means the integration of multiple information, communication, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to manage city assets. These assets include transportation, power, water, waste management, and other city services. By using sensors integrated with real-time monitoring systems, data is collected, processed, and analyzed to tackle inefficiencies. Since the goal of a smart city is to improve quality of life for the citizens, the use of data analytics is critical to finding actionable insights in the data.

Signals is a tool which can help cities and utilities seize the opportunities Smart Cities offer. This blog post describes several major opportunities Smart Cities have to improve life for their residents, lists several issues to consider when implementing the technologies, and concludes with sharing of lessons learned to date.

Opportunities for Smart City include:

1. Smart Energy Analytics

• Smarter use of lighting, particularly use of LEDs, can lower costs. When no people are in the vicinity, lights can be dimmed or turned off. Lights can also blink, and/or change colors when conditions dictate — a traffic accident for example. Having access to the data, analyzing it in near real-time, and taking appropriate actions is a great example of working smarter.
• A great example use case for analytics in smart energy is Envision Charlotte. The program became a national role model for energy savings in an urban environment, and became the role model for Envision America. This smart energy initiative used data analytics to reduce energy use by 16 percent since 2011.
• Smart Grid is another energy savings opportunity. Through outage detection, disaster recovery processes, support field operations, and smart meters, a city can work around outages and get services restored faster. See related blog post dealing with emergency response systems.

1. Transportation

• Multi-model transportation becomes intelligent in a Smart City, with real time location of buses and street cars. Technology also helps with fleet management, with sensors that measure idle, jackrabbit starts, and the GPS location when using a fuel card. Analyzing this data in real-time enables better management and lower cost.
• Smart traffic lights — cameras can detect traffic flow, keeping traffic moving faster, and ideally resulting in fewer accidents.
• Smart parking — with sensors embedded in parking spaces, cities can reduce the time drivers take in finding spots. On the enforcement side, cities have an opportunity to raise revenue with fines for cars parked after their expiration time.

1. Smart Data

• Open Data Portals are becoming the norm for a Smart City. This means having a data repository that anyone can access. See Charlotte’s Open Data Portal. This portal provides data in csv format, ideal for running ad-hoc queries in the Signals platform (see related blog post analyzing open data from the CFPB).
• Smart City technology provides the ability to generate new data from sensors. Examples include pollution and pollen levels, which can be made available to citizens who are sensitive to environmental changes. This is a perfect use for data visualization, so citizens can see the data displayed by geography.
• Open data also means the ability for citizens to report issues. Services can be improved, and authorities can respond faster to issues. Citizens can report data via text, which tends to fall into unstructured format (think email, text, and surveys).
• Open data also has business use. Imagine a restaurateur deciding where to locate a new restaurant. With traffic data from a Smart City data portal, one can pinpoint good restaurant locations that have high volumes of traffic at specific times on specific days.

1. Smart Infrastructure

• Smart City infrastructure captures high volumes of data, but converting raw data into information is the key to improving services. This is where data analytics shines, providing insights into the big data to determine the critical few items of concern.
• Sensors can detect lead content in water, and measure it in real time.
• Sensors can measure the water level in streams, in real time. Smart Cities have the ability to associate flood conditions to traffic lights and lighting systems, alerting citizens of issues and directly them safely away.
• Crowd control is another area where Smart Cities can use technology to improve services. When crowds form, access to food and drinks, restrooms, and trash removal are important. Sensors can detect when crowds gather, alerting authorities that a surge in services in needed at a location.

1. Smart Mobility

• For communities to benefit from the Smart City opportunity, data has to be mobile, interoperable, and unconstrained. The term “open data” is often used to describe transparency and availability in source information. The ability to run ad-hoc reports on data becomes more critical, and one cannot wait for a data scientist. Information needs to be analyzed for action in near real-time by the average user.
• Cities need to balance this smart mobility opportunity against privacy issues. Data anonymization is often used to remove personally identifiable information from data sets, so the people whom the data describe remain anonymous.

1. IoT Devices

• The Internet of Things provides us with reams of data. Integrating this data with social networks is a means of providing proximity information. While typically seen in social apps like Foursquare, proximity data can also be used to point out tourist attractions nearby, or when the next bus is scheduled to stop, or the open and close times of nearby stores.
• Sensors and beacons are the IoT devices typically mentioned for Smart City applications. The data collected on the devices needs to be transported to a storage device over a broadband network. In Charlotte this can be fiber, or wireless connections. Once the data is stored it must be analyzed for useful insights and real-time alerting.

Issues to consider when rolling out Smart City technologies include:

• Intellectual Property: Who owns the data being collected by the city? Who owns the data reported by citizens? Is all data open and freely available, or is some information restricted?
• Security: The opportunities and capabilities listed previously sound great, but what happens if hackers access the system of lighting and traffic signals, or water flow, or smart grids to reroute energy? Could ransomware apply to cities as it does to businesses and individuals?
• Privacy of personal information. Data anonymization needs to be part of the design of the Smart City. Deciding where and when to anonymize the data is important, as well as replication of the data for backup purposes.

Lessons Learned from other Smart City deployments:

• Data deluge. Smart Cities have found that as they deploy technology, the need for larger data storage and bandwidth become evident. When will the data be stored? How long will it be retained? How will data be analyzed? Cities are finding that data is consuming more computing resources, and like the line in the original Jaws movie, “we’re going to need a bigger boat”.

• Smart Cities have found the need for strong cross-functional collaboration. All citizens need to have access to information, and cities need to partner with businesses and organizations. (See related blog post: Collaborative Data Analytics)
• Multi-vendor technology will become the norm, making integration key to success.
• Much of the Smart City technology is bleeding edge. This is an immature market, with protocols needing to be standardized across vendors.

It is clear that Smart City has many opportunities for cities, but it is early in the technology life-cycle, and there many issues that need to be considered. We don’t know all the answers, but we do know the future is going to be exciting!

Stratifyd Signals is a data analytics platform with a machine learning engine that processes big data files in a matter of minutes. It is an ideal platform for achieving real-time, actionable insights.

If you have a project in mind where we can help, contact us at clientsupport@stratifyd.com. We’d love to work with you!