To cope with growing population, over-urbanization, globalization and to ensure economic and environmental stability, cities are now focusing on becoming smart cities. Smart city is a concept that uses technology and connected data sensors to enhance infrastructure and city operations management capabilities. This includes monitoring and managing public assets, transportation systems, citizens, power plants, water supplies, information systems, civil institutions and other community services.
Connected technologies and IoT solutions play an important role in transforming cities into smart cities. Implementing smart cities using IoT and connected technologies can help improve the quality, performance and interactivity of city services, optimize resources and reduce costs.
Let’s look at the various components of a smart city and their role in the IoT era:
1. Intelligent infrastructure
Smart infrastructure includes advanced connected streets, smart parking, smart lighting and other transportation innovations. Here’s how they work:
● Smart lighting: With smart lighting, city managers can monitor lighting in real-time to ensure optimal lighting and provide demand-based lighting in different areas. Smart lighting can also help with daylighting and energy conservation by dimming lights in areas that are not highly occupied, such as parking lots, communities, and roads, and can automatically dim lights when no people or vehicles are passing by.
● Connected streets: Connected and smart streets can capture data from millions of devices and provide information and services, including information about traffic, road congestion, road construction and more. This helps to effectively manage resources and people to improve public transportation and urban landscapes.
● Smart Parking Management: Smart parking management systems can be used to find vacant parking spaces in different public places. Ground vehicle detection sensors in smart parking lots are core technologies that play a key role in smart parking solutions that allow drivers in shopping malls and city centers to find available parking spaces. Wireless sensors are embedded in parking spaces and send data via local signal processors to a central parking management application regarding the time and duration of parking space usage. Smart parking can reduce congestion, reduce vehicle emissions, reduce enforcement costs and reduce driver stress. In order to effectively deploy smart parking technology, each device needs to establish a reliable connection with the cloud server.
● Connected Charging Stations: Smart infrastructure also includes charging stations throughout the city in places such as parking lots, shopping malls and buildings, airports and bus stations. EV charging platforms can be integrated with IoT to streamline EV charging operations and address grid impacts.
2. Intelligent buildings and properties
Smart buildings utilize different systems to ensure the safety of the building, asset maintenance and the overall health of the surrounding environment.
● Safety and security systems: including the implementation of remote monitoring, biometrics, IP surveillance cameras and wireless alarms to reduce the chance of unauthorized entry into the building and theft. It also includes utilizing boundary access controls to prevent access to restricted areas of the property and monitoring unauthorized persons in unauthorized areas.
● Smart Garden and Sprinkler Systems: Smart sprinkler systems are synchronized with connected and cloud technologies and can be used to water plants, ensuring they receive the right amount of water. Smart gardening devices can also perform tasks such as measuring soil moisture and fertilizer levels, helping municipalities save on water bills (smart sprinklers tap into weather reports and automatically turn off when it rains), and prevent lawn overgrowth in an appropriate manner (robot lawn mower).
● Smart air conditioning system: Smart air conditioning system monitors various parameters such as temperature, pressure, vibration, building humidity, etc. The deployment of wireless sensor networks is key to ensuring proper heating and ventilation. These sensors also collect data to optimize HVAC systems, improving their efficiency and performance in buildings.
3. Smart city services
Smart city services include public safety and emergency services. Here are the key areas where IoT and connected technologies can help:
● Smart kiosks: Smart kiosks play an important role in providing different city services to the public, such as Wi-Fi services, 7×24 surveillance cameras and digital signage for inquiries, advertisements and public announcements. In some cases, free video calling and free mobile charging are also possible, as well as environmental sensor integration. Smart kiosks also provide information about nearby area restaurants, retail stores and events. It also provides maps for visitors and can be synced with smartphones to provide additional information as needed.
● Monitor hazardous areas: Sensors (cameras, street lights) and actuators enable real-time monitoring in hazardous areas or accident-prone areas. If any crime or incident is detected, these sensors can alert citizens to temporarily avoid these areas.
● Public safety: IoT sensors can be installed in public places and homes to protect citizens and provide real-time information to police departments when a theft is detected.
● Fire/explosion management: Smart fire sensors can monitor and automatically take action based on severity, such as detecting false alarms, notifying fire brigade and medical aid, blocking nearby streets/buildings as required, helping people evacuate, and coordinating rescue drones and robots.
● Automated medical dispatch: Smart medical devices can be implemented in public places to provide 24/7 healthcare services to patients, such as dispensing medications to patients. These devices can also be used to call an ambulance to pick up a patient in an emergency.
4. Smart energy management
Here’s how cities can implement smart energy management:
● Smart Energy: Smart energy is a digitally monitored energy self-healing system that delivers electricity or natural gas from the source. Smart energy solutions can span industrial, residential and transmission and distribution projects. Various IoT solutions such as gateways can be used to achieve energy savings at both the transmission and consumer levels. Gateways, for example, can provide a broader view of energy distribution patterns to utility companies with high connectivity and real-time analytics. Additionally, it develops a demand response mechanism for utility service providers to optimize energy distribution based on consumption patterns.
● Smart meters: Smart meters can be used for residential and industrial metering to identify real-time information on electricity, natural gas and energy usage. Consumers and utility companies with smart meters can monitor their energy consumption. Additionally, energy analytics, reporting content, and more can be accessed using mobile apps integrated with these smart meters.
5. Intelligent water management
IoT and connected devices enable smart water management through:
● Drinking water monitoring: Monitor the quality of urban tap water.
● Chemical spills: Identify factory emissions and waste in rivers.
● Remote measurement of swimming pool: Remote control of swimming pool water quality conditions.
● Marine pollution levels: Control ocean leaks and waste generation.
● Leak monitoring: Monitor the presence of liquid outside the tank and pressure changes along the pipeline.
● Flood monitoring: Monitor water level changes in rivers, dams and reservoirs.
6. Intelligent waste management
Smart solutions for tracking waste help cities and waste service managers optimize waste, reduce operating costs, and better address environmental issues associated with inefficient waste collection.
7. Intelligent industrial environment
Industrial environments offer unique opportunities to develop applications related to IoT and connected technologies, which can be used in areas such as:
● Forest fire detection: Helps monitor combustion gases and sudden fire situations to determine warning areas.
● Air/Noise Pollution: Helps control carbon dioxide emissions from factories, vehicle emissions and harmful gases from farms.
● Snow monitoring: Helps identify real-time conditions on ski slopes, allowing safety companies to prevent avalanches.
● Landslide and avalanche avoidance: Helps monitor soil moisture, soil density, and vibration to identify hazardous patterns beneath the land.
● Early Earthquake Monitoring: Helps monitor the likelihood of earthquakes by using distributed control at specific earthquake locations.
● Liquid monitoring: Helps monitor the presence of liquids in data centers, construction sites and warehouses to prevent failures and corrosion.
● Radiation levels: Facilitates distributed measurement of radiation levels around nuclear power plants to generate leak alerts.
● Explosive and Hazardous Gases: Helps monitor gas levels and leaks in chemical plants, industrial environments and mines.
Resumir
The implementation of smart cities brings huge opportunities to transform people’s lives and improve the overall infrastructure and operations of the city. Smart sensor networks, Internet of Things (IoT) and connected technologies are key to smart city implementation.
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