Creating Smart City Solutions with Intelligent Sensors and Data Fusion
Presents
Transportation of people and goods is a top priority for the larger Cities in the world. Population growth, congestion and the growing demand for mobility all place increasing burdens on transport systems with negative impacts for businesses, residents and overall quality of life.
The need for intelligent / Smart solutions for the Cities have never been larger.
Focus Area
The vision of using the data from multiple domains to optimize the city infrastructure is in evermore focus at governments, municipalities and solution providers around the world.
The data amounts available in the cities are huge. For making this information potentially useful, the real-time data streams must not overwhelm the actors involved. The data are to be fused to high-quality information to provide decision support to both automatic systems and decision makers.
The possibilities are many, and infrastructure cost are huge – so where to start?
The challenges in the cities are many, and not all have been identified.
Smart-Parking is one of the areas which are interesting in the Cities because of a growing number of cars faced with a limited number of parking spaces. This tendency is noticeable in many city centers due to the noise and emissions being generated by the increasing amount of traffic searching for parking spaces and it has given rise to the need for complex parking management systems. Parking management solutions based on intelligent sensor networks can increase efficiency and give a city the infrastructure required for other smart city applications into the bargain.
Siemens Intelligent City Parking Management solution is based on overhead radar detectors constantly collecting information about the parking situation. The information is forwarded to drivers in order to make it easier for them to find unoccupied parking spaces. In addition, the data is transmitted to a parking management center so that cities can intelligently manage their parking spaces.
As the radar sensors are installed at height, they can scan a larger area than in-ground detection devices and thus monitor several cars at a time. Because they also scan bicycle paths and entryways, they assist enforcement personnel to quickly determine where dangerously parked vehicles obstruct traffic. And is an example of one intelligent sensor type with multiple use cases
The Challenge
Our challenge to you is to come up with an innovative and intelligent solution/concept to a specific challenge within the city – which you have either, experiences yourself or read about.
The challenge is about problem solving via intelligently combining technologies and data from various sources and domains – new as well as already existing within the city.
Which data is available and which is missing? What can we do with the data? How do we make structure in chaos? Are the any side effects of our solution (positive / negative)?
It’s about thinking out of the box, looking at things upside down, combining otherwise different domains in new contexts and blowing our minds with your creativity.
Considerations (if you need more to think about)
- How do we power and interconnect sensors all over the city in the most efficient way ?
- The physical appearance of the sensors. How do they influence the surroundings?
- What should the best business model look like?
- Who has an interest in owning the system and why?
- How can we share data from systems with different owners and still make a business?
- What are the challenges about open data and owned data ?
- What is the municipality buying ?
- How do we ensure citizen privacy and data security?
- What other opportunities does a sensor network give?
Find more information here:
Smart parking Frederiksberg
Open data from Copenhagen Municipality
Siemens Smart City
