In a connected world, cities operate without a noticeable hiccup.
Networks of sensors, cameras and devices work together to manage the urban environment and send information to citizens, communities or business stakeholders. Many innovations are emerging in the field of transport, energy, utilities and crisis management, designed to bring a better quality of life taking into account the growth of the IoT.
If these investments improve government services, it’s a headache for storing, analyzing, and integrating, or simply managing data. Reassessing how these are addressed is key to maximizing the value of smart cities. There are three fundamental principles to effectively manage data: it must be actively transmitted through different channels, be in a secure environment, and be scalable.
Smart cities face several data challenges
With these three principles in mind, communities are working to upgrade their decades-old infrastructure to meet the needs of new technologies. However, at the heart of this modernization is the need to quickly extract value from data to take the next steps.
With the deployment of IoT, data is generated at a breakneck pace and must be stored, analyzed and distributed instantly across the network. Traditional databases, processed manually, are no longer optimal due to the amount of data. In the context of smart cities, this could lead to errors and incorrect information relayed to citizens. The associated risk is not negligible.
Data streams from city-wide IoT devices is critical to being able to monitor what’s happening in real time. This can be achieved via a smart processing framework that connects to a data hub (or even multiple hubs for greater resilience). This reduces and enriches the data, all in real time.
This now enriched data can be quickly routed to the hub to be processed and distributed to all stakeholders to be able to make decisions on time. In turn, communities can make quick decisions based on real-time data, refine their operations, and plan strategies that positively impact day-to-day challenges.
Real-time benefits for interventions
Communities place a high priority on critical response situations, where timeliness is critical to solving problems. Because, it’s known: A city never sleeps. Data is always in motion and needs to be managed accordingly. For example, to enable first responders to get to the scene of an incident quickly, public authorities need real-time information on traffic management,
such as congestion levels and local road closures. Similarly, for citizens, sharing live information about accidents helps them plan their route accordingly.
Real-time data provides visibility into ongoing interventions in a city, but making this information actionable requires easy access to and filtering of multiple data sources.
