The use cases for Smart Cities are varied in scope and depth. Below, find brief summaries of a few deployed smart city use cases from the 2015 Global Cities Team Challenge that illustrate the diversity of smart city architectures[1].
Safe Community Alert Network (SCALE): Montgomery County, MD
The Safe Community Alert (SCALE) network seeks to bring the safety and security of connected devices to everyone, regardless of their financial means or technical savvy. This showcases a new network of public safety with a diverse ecosystem of devices, standards, and connectivity options. The SCALE network, currently being demonstrated in a senior living facility in Montgomery County Maryland, senses hazardous air and water factors as well as some facets of the physical health and well-being of resident volunteers. This real world test bed has deployed environmental sensors to detect a variety of factors including: smoke, carbon dioxide and monoxide, some toxic gases, humidity, temperature, particulates, and some forms of pollen. Sensors also detect water consumption and contaminants. The data compliments information related to the health of a resident that comes from health devices such as blood glucose monitors, heart monitors, and oxygen machines. It can even detect events such as falls, unauthorized access to sensitive areas, or a resident that has wandered off. Data collected from sensing of events goes to the SCALE platform where applications can then be built. The SCALE network contains a text message notification system, automatically initiated conference calls with family and care providers, dashboards for first responders, and analytics for public health officials, all with affordable forms of technology and connectivity.
Managing Urban Air Quality: Chicago, IL
This project is investigating how cities might optimize air quality by managing traffic flow, for instance, via schedules or temporary routing. This requires understanding of the spatial and temporal dynamics of urban air contaminants, particularly related to vehicle emissions, and in the context of diverse weather, natural topology, and built form of cities. The project leverages Chicago’s Array of Things (AoT) initiative, which uses resilient embedded systems technology developed at Argonne National Laboratory. The AoT provides an urban scale testbed to embed new technologies and services in the built infrastructure, enabling application developers to access near-real time, high spatial-temporal resolution data about urban air quality, weather, and other factors. Deploying technologies in urban spaces is costly, so the project leverages existing street furniture, integrating AoT’s air quality and environmental sensors into solar powered, networked waste stations built by BigBelly, a waste solutions company. BigBelly operates nearly 30,000 waste stations in cities globally, and provides a vehicle through which sensors can be deployed in many diverse urban settings. The project brings together computer science, cyber physical systems, distributed systems, and sensor systems expertise to explore technical and societal challenges
- ↑ Global City Teams overviews, https://www.us-ignite.org/globalcityteams/actioncluster/archive/
