Canada is moving forward with great initiatives to support the smart cities development as the government well understood it is a technology race that will promote the country’s image and create opportunities to sell and promote our technologies abroad. What amaze me is the social and community dimension of this revolution as a citizen, way of life and environment are put together at the center of the strategy.
We are in the merge of a new world population distribution and countries have to face the inevitable city growth and prepare an adequate, intelligent and scalable infrastructure. Energy, waste, pollution, methods of communication, interactivity, transportation, traffic, and government services are the big challenges to manage environmental and human impacts. This transformation will be influenced by the population itself based on the acquaintance of technology, preferences, way of life, community, office location or work status. Media and marketing agencies already acquire the voice of the people through surveys and buyer’s persona analysis. Although, I believe organizations can definitely tenfold their effort to reach “the voice of customers”.
The areas of applications were already covered in many published articles such as, Energy Savings, Traffic Management Systems., etc. No need to reiterate, instead, for the first part of this article, I will only discuss 2 domains where the potential is huge and full of startup opportunities: Building and Public transportation. Secondly, I will open the debate on 3 major element organizations need to focus on for a successful smart city development.
Let’s start by my favorite smart domains:
Smart buildings:
The obvious objective is to transform and utilize buildings to improve people’s lives. In another word, implementation of intelligent control system interacting with the environment and user habits. For example, an office building with a regulated temperature control system taking all factors into consideration such as, sensing the number of people in a given room, the hours of operation., etc. These buildings would be connected with other useful applications to exchange data. We can install intelligent display as media signage giving local city and national news with relevant citizen information based on business team profile, weather, traffic conditions depending on the day of the week., etc. A system that facilitate the data accessibility to optimize citizen life and activities during working hours and afterwork hours.
Today, some partnership already exist with Siemens and Microsoft ABB racing to reduce energy costs for companies. Building management system applications are so wide that a simple article would not be enough to give you what it is already in the pipeline as many domains of the industries are involved. In this example, we already have an idea of the future complexity and the amount of data to manage which require lots of storage, efficiency and AI!
Smart Transportations:
Smart public transit is essential to meet the challenges of urbanization. The first action is already in progress in Europe to integrate public transport into other services such as connected infrastructure (e.g. traffic lights, traffic monitoring and parking). The inner-city buses in Stockholm communicate with traffic lights to be granted priority if they are running late and information boards provide travellers with information about delays and alternate routes. A startup company MaaS Global now offers citizens in Helsinki multimodal means of transportation including car pools, bikes and taxis. In Canada Smart traffic Signal TrafficLink has been implemented in Waterloo (Ontario) and Brossard (Quebec) with already positive results on Road capacity, greenhouse gas emissions, accident and road conditions.
As you can see through this 2 examples, Market opportunity is huge and will request a synergy of technologies such as, and not limited to, AI, Website, mobile applications, IoT, Media, security, community blogs, software supports and the list goes on…The new city era will focus on benefits for the citizens everything from reducing friction, stress, pollution in cities where population is increasing fast, but not limited to only big cities. Small cities is already testing and or deploying quick wins. We are just at the beginning of the journey and challenges will appear from anywhere.