Arun Kumar, Chief IT, GlobalLogic: IoT to Assume a Significant Part in building a Shrewd City

During the most recent couple of years, there have been huge conversations around building brilliant urban areas in India. The inquiry to pose is, what truly characterizes a savvy city? Envision a city that behaves like a living organic entity, connects with you, and constantly answers your requirements. A city that not just constantly peruses live information from different sources (sensors) yet additionally breaks down it to gauge changes and modifies its way of behaving as indicated by changing information designs. A city that has a powerful relationship with its residents instead of a straightforward conditional relationship. That, in my view, is an ideal meaning of a shrewd city.

During the last few years, there have been enormous discussions about building smart cities in India. The question to ask is what really defines a smart city? Imagine a city that acts like a living organism, interacts with you, and continuously responds to your needs.

A city not only continuously reads live data from various sources (sensors) but also analyzes it to forecast changes and alters its behavior according to changing data patterns. That, in my view, is a perfect definition of a smart city. A smart city is considered smart due to its inherent intelligence in dealing with its resources and environment. Internet of Things inputs the required intelligence into the basic building blocks of the city and helps make it smart!

Just imagine sensors monitoring energy usage, water levels, traffic flows and parking lots, the environment, and security cameras, and sending that data directly to the city monitoring control center. Smart cities possess the massive potential to completely turn around the operational efficiency of a city, and IOT is the technical foundation behind the same. Below are some of the tangible use cases of using IOT in building a smart city. Lighting accounts for a large percentage of the total energy consumption of any modern city.

While electricity and lighting is an essential element, it is also being used to enhance beauty and identity in every developing city today. Lighting turns whether adaptive, the digital system smartly plans the maintenance work for the entire city and creates maintenance routes. Finding a parking space can be a daunting task in today’s cities. Using IoT, the parking spaces of a city can be equipped with sensors to sense if they are already occupied.

All the parking lots of the city can be further connected with a city navigation system which can help the drivers find the nearest parking location resulting in saved fuel, time, road utilization hours, and CO2 emission. City Waste Management can be made smarter by introducing smart garbage containers having a sensor to determine the filling level of waste in the container. The garbage containers can transmit this data to the central city waste management system, which can automatically guide the waste collection trucks to the nearest garbage container which is full.

It will convert the rudimentary static garbage collection system with an optimized system based on real-time data related to garbage container filling level, resulting in much better efficiency and predictability in the overall process. Smart Traffic Management system. IOT can help in smart traffic management by installing battery/solar-powered wireless traffic sensors which can detect real-time traffic volume, road occupancy, and average travel speed of vehicles by road or lane.

These sensors can be connected to the central traffic management system of the city, giving a complete picture of the present traffic situation. Based on the traffic pattern, the advanced decision-making algorithms can automatically adjust the duration of traffic lights and generate complaints against traffic rule violators, and smart cars can be connected with this system to automatically find the optimum route to a destination. Sensors can be placed around the city to continuously monitor critical environmental parameters like electromagnetic field, noise, temperature/humidity, CO2/toxic gases, combustion gases to detect fire, and so on. 

Analysis of this data can give insights into critical environmental conditions at various places in the city, along with their trends. The Internet of Things is a fast-growing and pervasive reality, and so are Smart Cities. These Smart Cities will have everything connected to a network - starting from the electricity grid to buildings, from roads/signage to cars and parking lots, and from water tanks to taps.

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