Smart Industry 1/2019

home, local leaders want a fair share
of the potential growth. Growth is an
indicator of a thriving city and councils
realize that they need to deliver the
services and quality of life people seek.
Several elements brought into focus
during the public competition for
Amazon’s second headquarters also
apply to most businesses. Factors at
work include an educated workforce, a
forgiving tax structure, transportation,
room to grow, and the ability to stand
out. Employees have different criteria
for selecting where to live and spend
their free time and every person’s set
of priorities is unique. Citizen’s choices
are driven by issues such as safe
neighborhoods; work and educational
opportunities; housing costs; efficient
transportation; the convenience of
arts, leisure, recreation, and community
activities; and the “energy” given
off by the community.
Bullish on Smart Solutions
To address the urban challenges that
come with such growth, and to become
more competitive, municipal
authorities are embracing technology
as they become especially bullish
about “smart city solutions,” adopting
them as new but essential tools.
By adding Global Positioning System
chips, sensors, cameras, and other devices
to traditional municipal assets,
such as streetlights and trash cans,
cities are transforming into a digital
conurbation that can be measured,
monitored, and analyzed to improve
outcomes.
Smart city solutions are data-driven
systems that either provide managers
with greater situational awareness
leading to better decision-making, or
that drive automatic actions, increasingly
assisted by machine learning
and artificial intelligence algorithms.
Peter Drucker, the great management
thinker, offered his own guidance on
this: “You can’t manage what you can’t
measure” – a rule that’s being applied
in earnest in today’s cities.
The most prevalent of the new city
solutions is smart lighting. As with
the death of traditional incandescent
bulbs, the bright new hopes of highpressure
sodium (HPS) and metal
halide (MH) streetlights are now dimming.
The replacement fixtures are
LEDs because they reduce energy usage
and cut costs by up to 50 percent.
LED replacements don’t make a city
smart but they can be deployed along
with a lighting control system to make
each streetlight a manageable asset.
Such control gives a city’s department
of public works new capabilities that
improve the lighting service delivered.
These new capabilities add abilities
such as remotely turning lights on
and off, or dimming them during different
parts of the day throughout the
year. When combined with motion
detectors, lamps can be automatically
turned on if the presence of a person
or vehicle is detected. Controllers can
also help cities reduce the maintenance
costs of streetlights by 30 to 50
percent and reduce energy usage by
an additional 25 to 30 percent. Customer
complaints about burned-out
lights could be eliminated by giving
management staff proactive alerts to
imminent lighting issues.
Beyond lighting there are numerous
other solutions being deployed
today, including keeping watch in
crime-ridden areas, rapidly informing
first responders, measuring
economic activity, improving traffic
at dense intersections, correlating
weather conditions to electrical and
other intermittent problems, tracking
road conditions, and providing municipal
announcements to citizens.
The variety of smart city applications
is matched only by the range of city
problems.
Streetlights
will be the
eyes and ears
of tomorrow’s
smart cities.
Anil Agrawai,
CEO Cimcon Lighting
Specific technologies have come to
the forefront to solve these diverse
challenges. Most notably, there are
sensors that can be attached to streetlights
to transform the lighting infrastructure
into a citywide mesh to
create a digital canopy across the city.
Readings can be transmitted from the
sensor network back to a central management
system where the data can
be aggregated, correlated with other
information, and analyzed.
One such smart city platform is Near-
Sky offered by Cimcon Lighting. According
to Anil Agrawal, the company’s
CEO and founder: “We had a vision
that NearSky could soon transform the
nondescript streetlight infrastructure
into a platform that would be the eyes
and ears of tomorrow’s smart cities.
The convenience and density of the
streetlight infrastructure, which provides
street-level resolution, was unmatched.
It also offered the physical
real estate and power that were essential
elements for deploying smart city
solutions.”
Technology alone isn’t the answer.
It may turn the outdoor world into a
series of data streams but it still takes
people to act. In the same way cities
have begun to invest in smart technologies,
they have also begun to invest
in their management teams.
A smart city strategy is usually led by a
chief technology officer, a chief digital
officer, a chief information officer, or
a chief innovation officer. All of these
roles stem from the need for challenges
to be addressed by a person or
team with a cross-departmental focus.
Systems were deployed originally as
point solutions with their focus on a
single department but it has become
clear that a smart city is built over time
and there is a need to have a data
management strategy that spans all
departments and all projects to get
the best outcomes.
The smart city is not a radically new
concept. People have been imagining
the benefits for decades but the
concept is finally gaining traction.
There is an increasing sense that not
having a plan for becoming a smarter
city could mean your municipality will
be on the outside looking in for
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