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Smart Sustainable Urban Model of the real city as complex cyber-physical system

The cool thing you can do with Smart City Monitor running is that it fosters digital transformation of the common cities into the Smart Cities. The Smart Sustainable City model is a virtual copy of your real cyber-physical city and it runs on the Smart City server having connections to all its data sources which provide real time data about ongoing civic processes. The computer model calculates and processes multiple data streams in real time and then presents human friendly information to all citizens, tourists, visitors and businesses online improving Quality of Life, Economic growth, city image and its budget. The special applications for the city administration and utility service providers foster sustainable and effective management or urban processes.

While the practical implementation of the Smart Sustainable City model is relatively simple especially in middle size cities and towns, it requires innovative vision, knowledge of local urban processes and certain skills for using the Smart City Model builder. The company supports implementation of the Smart City projects and provides training workshops for the city specialists who develop the model for their city.

Smart City 37120 model provides Smart City Team and the city administration with quick and easy turn-key solution to launch integrated view of Smart City in compliance to international standard ISO 37120 “Sustainable development of communities — Indicators for city services and quality of life” for all theme-objects and core indicators. It helps getting necessary experience including preparing and connecting the Model to Open Data sources.

Further step by step advancing of the Smart City Model can be realized accordingly to the model development plan corresponding to overall city development plans and policies.

The Smart Sustainable City Model development can be implemented by the local Smart City Team by using interactive model builder runing on a common notebook without need for programming. It consists of defining the city structure and separate objects to be introduced into the model, describing its properties, adding indicators, its targets, constants, data sources including sensors and databases, etc.

The model allows gradual step-by-step upgrading to include all necessary city properties such as maps, geographic locations of the objects, mapping of the districts, integrating performance information of objects into overall performance of the districts and the whole city, considering development plans and targets, adding new open data sources, policies. When the model is available and runs on evidence data it can effectively support planning, simulation of major policy making decisions and evaluation of risks.

In particular the Smart Sustainable City Model implementation can foster and utilize

Implementation of various smart digital components in different geo-locations, districts (environment, energy, water, waste, transportation, etc) for data and measurements collection
Use of wide area networks, short range communication, access to smart technologies at lower cost, energy efficiency
Innovative components in Internet including optical networks, greener infrastructure, broadband equipment for both fixed and mobile networks, network resource management, radio technologies, scalability, cost efficiency, quality of service
New methods of Smart Governance and future business models with high citizens participation, improved urban culture, E-health, energy-friendly solutions, digital homes, enterprises, schools, transport, horizontal services for all city stakeholders.
New ways of presenting citizens and administration complex big data in the easy understandable user friendly way
Smart Intelligent Objects in the Smart City
Provided by sensors, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and micro servers the City objects both moving and stationary ones become Smart Objects. They are capable to receive, process and reveal quantitative information about their current state, operating conditions and realize necessary controls to optimize performance of both the object and the City over common Wi-Fi network.

Such Smart Object allows for example as follows:

Decreasing light intensity on streets during the night in case there is no traffic or movements in pedestrian areas to save energy,
Measuring and making water consumption adjustable to local area conditions defined centrally in the central city server
Monitoring real time passenger transportation such as busses, trains and regulating its intensity to address current density of passenger traffic in some routes and locations in near real time
Calculating and presenting expected time of next arrival of bus, train, etc based on actual data from the bus/train as Smart Object
Switching on cameras or making pictures in case there are moving objects above of normal speed of pedestrians i.e. running (normal speed range between 0-5 km/h)
Switching on additional cameras or make pictures in particular location of the city where there is expected or unexpected event takes place (fire, explosion, sewage problem, crowd gathering, extraterrestrial/magical …., etc)
Measuring combinations of environmental data, noise, high frequency emissions of various types, etc. providing integrated view for possible harmful impacts
Calculating and presenting current number of visitors in particular public places vs. its maximum capacity, e.g. parking slots, seats in restaurants, cinema, etc.
The variety of smart applications are based on Smart Sustainable City Server capacity to collect data from many sources, including Smart Objects, process it accordingly to rules defined by the City Administration in the Smart City Model, and undertake certain (allowed) actions automatically in response to internal dynamics of Change in City Life.

Smart City engine can communicate with Internet of Things (IoT) and automation control systems via common high level communication protocols using https as transport. Its underlying PharosN platform allows generic solutions avoiding specific proprietary requirements by the hardware of some manufacturers or protocols of controllers. As the result the platform meets the challenges of monitoring of both relatively small objects like machines, vehicles, buildings, offices, homes as well as large industrial systems.

The solution supports both direct communications with smart sensors and IoT as primary sources of data streams of measurements as well as with automation control systems having large number of various heterogeneous data sources.

For example, there are technical solutions able to read sensors by Rest API for temperature and other measurements. In this case, the platform can act as a single point of collection for all sensor readings, its processing and presentation to users for monitoring and visualization.

In case of industrial automation e.g. water, energy, waste, fire, operational statuses of equipment, etc. and relevant management systems, the installed sensors can be made by different manufacturers and support different protocols. In such systems the most commonly used automation solutions are the OPC engines or SCADA systems controlling large number of devices and processing relevant data.

The PharosN platform can communicate with such systems and IoT through common open access protocols collecting (get) or receiving (push) big data in a json file. If sensors or actuators have different industrial protocols such as ModBus, BACnet, KNX, etc, the relevant additional controllers – bridges allow for data streams receipt. When there are the OPC XML-DA and OPC UA engines, industrial networks, the platform can work use these protocols as well.

When working with the systems positioned as the IoT, its integration with Smart City engine is easy. The engine can access IoT devices based on support of standard open-source protocols REST API, SOAP, MQTT and SNMP using various software frameworks like AllJoyn and Iotivity providing access to sensor readings via Rest API.

In general the REST API is preferable since it is easy to use and is one of the most common protocols for the exchange of data via WEB. Increasing number of manufacturers of sensors, controllers and software use the protocol in various control and management systems, providing the possibility of access to monitoring functions through Rest API as well. For example, it can be used for control and measurements of light bulbs and street lights.

The SOAP protocol is most common in industrial systems. The use of SNMP protocol is recommended mostly for closed networks e.g. LANs due to the fact that has shortcomings in security.

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The dotted block in the Picture refers to the systems which are not described here but allow access to monitoring functions via some network protocols. If the protocol is missing in the list it can be promptly implemented by the Smart City Monitor development team upon customer request. Some new standards and relevant technologies under implementation will be supported in the releases of the platform upgrades.

It should be taken into consideration that Smart City Monitor  platform can automatically import the stored sensor data from structured databases or files using its data import procedures as well.

Learn here how PharosN let rapid application development environment for quick prototyping of complex custom IoT solutions that enable high level functions such as monitoring, analytics, and benchmarking, holistic assessment of system sustainability in real time.