How to Build a Smart City?

What technology do you need to build a smart city?

When people are asked to describe a smart city, “urbanization”, “collaboration”, and “technology” are commonly heard. While the perception is correct, thanks to the media for fueling imaginations, the process and technology involved in developing a smart city are less popularly known, hindering the evolution of current cities.

To start, technology in a smart city are those that improve public safety, urban mobility, public health, and environment monitoring. 

Smart City Use Cases

• Public Safety
• Environmental Health and Monitoring
• Urban Mobility
• Public Health

1. Smart Public Safety

• Crowd detection
• Dynamic investigation of vandalism / graffiti
• Smoke detection and emergency / situation awareness

Technologies:

1. Surveillance: To provide situational awareness using event-based surveillance
2. Police Investigation: Identify suspects and collect evidence swiftly
3. Public Order: Control crowds in public spaces and major events
4. Emergency Management: Rapidly target interventions in case of man-made/natural disasters
5. Risk and Compliance: Provide forensic evidence for citizen claims again public security officers
6. Crime prediction: Predict trends in particular types of crime in city areas
7. Post-Event Investigations: Radically speed up the process of event investigation using surveillance
8. Situational Awareness: Trigger a call to action based on FR / pre-configured scenario for quick review of the event and make accurate threat assessments

Check Out: Smart Command Center

2. Smart Urban Mobility

• Parking management for guidance and violation detection
• Traffic flow and incident detection
• License plate recognition

Technologies

1. Traffic Management: Reduce congestion, increase traffic safety and improve infrastructure planning
2. Revenue Collection: road tolls, car taxes, and traffic violation fines
3. Parking: Managing occupancy to improve services for drivers and maximize revenues for parking operator, parking violation enforcement for disabled spaces and oversized vehicles
4. Micro-Mobility: Crowd management safety, and analytics for pedestrians, bicycles, electric scooters, etc.
5. Mobility: Obtain intelligence on traffic direction, speed, and vehicle types to alleviate congestion and optimize traffic flows
6. Crowd management: Analyze and track crowd demographics, size, and movement patterns to optimize traffic flow and ensure safety

3. Smart Environmental Monitoring

• Illegal dumping and detection
• Weather monitoring with flooding detection

Technologies:

1. Air Quality: Monitor and analyze air quality
2. Noise: Monitor and analyze sound nuisance and pollution
3. Waste: Improve waste collection and illegal dumping
4. Water: Monitor water and wastewater infrastructure to avoid leakage and floods; control quality, PH level, turbidity, conductivity, and optimize maintenance, metering and treatment
5. Streetlights: Control illumination intensity and dynamic to reduce energy consumption, increase public safety and maintenance savings
6. Public Health: Guidance and regulation announcements, contact tracing, and crowd management

4. Smart Public Health

1. Enforce Physical Distancing: Quantify and analyze distance between people and locations over time to identify non-compliance with Physical and Social Distancing mandates
2. Efficient Employee Contact Tracing: Advanced multi-camera search pinpoints and traces diagnosed employees through accurate FR, appearance similarity, and proximity identification to notify at-risk staff and engage in safety protocols
3. Facemask Detection: Search and identify mask usage through video. Detect and alert when face masks are detected or not on an individual, in real-time, and understand face mask compliance over time and location
4. Manage Occupancy: Monitor the number of people in a space to comply with occupancy regulations and ensure public safety
5. Reduce Crowding and Hotspots: Dashboard visually represent object movement, behavior trending, hotspots, and object interactions
6. Manage Building Maintenance and Cleaning: Enable count-based alters for entryways and triggering notifications for cleaning crews when more than a certain number of people has entered the space.

Check out: COVID-19 Safety Protocols: Challenges and Solutions

Consult with i3 Technologies as we Move Towards a Smarter Tomorrow, building smart cities with video analytics and integrated security and safety systems.

Source: Smart Cities of Today: Technology and Intelligence for driving Safety and Sustainability, presented by Briefcam, a sister company of AXIS Communications, our AXIS Solutions Gold Partner.