Smart Cities and Measurable Cities – a technological perspective

Roberto Minerva

IEEE IoT Initiative Chairman, Telecom Italia Lab

Introduction

What a (Smart) City is

– What a Smart City is

– How large a “Smart City” is

– Networks of Smart Cities

Before Smartness … comes Measurability

– The Quest for Data

– What, How, When to measure

Technological Transformation Examples

– Past

– ICT technologies impact

– Vertical vs Horizontal Applications

Need for a Purpose and Integration

12/09/20162

What a City is

3

Cities are defined as a cluster of contiguous grid cells of 1 km² with a population density of at least 1 500 inhabitants per km².

a functional urban area: which consists of a city and its commuting zone; the latter is defined in relation to commuting

patterns, on the basis of those municipalities with at least 15 % of their employed residents working in a city (see Map 2);

a greater city: in some cases, the urban centre stretches far beyond the administrative boundaries and so to better capture the

entire centre, a ‘greater city’ has been defined (generally applicable only to capital cities and other relatively large cities);

a city: the most basic level, a local administrative unit (LAU), defined by its urban centre that has a minimum population of

50 thousand inhabitants, consisting of a cluster of contiguous grid cells of 1 km² with a population density of at least 1 500

inhabitants per km²;

subcity districts: a subdivision of the city according to population criteria (generally between a minimum of 5 thousand and a

maximum of 40 thousand inhabitants); they should be defined for all capital cities and for non-capital cities with more than

250 thousand inhabitants.

Source: Urban Europe — statistics on cities, towns and suburbs — introduction available at

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-

explained/index.php/Urban_Europe_%E2%80%94_statistics_on_cities,_towns_and_suburbs_%E2%80%94_introdu

ction#Background_information_outlining_key_methodological_concepts_for_EU_statistics_on_territorial_typologies

What a Smart City is

For policy purposes, the EU defines a smart city as ‘a place where traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital and telecommunication technologies, for the benefit of its inhabitants and businesses’.

Smart cities are innovative, making traditional networks and services more efficient through the use of digital technologies, creating more inclusive, sustainable and connected cities for the benefit of inhabitants, public administrations and businesses.

Smart cities have the potential to improve the quality of life, while ensuring the needs of present and future generations with respect to economic, social and environmental challenges.

The concept of smart cities covers a broad range of areas such as: the economy, the environment, mobility, or governance.

4

Source: Urban Europe — statistics on cities, towns and suburbs — smart

cities available at http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-

explained/index.php/Urban_Europe_%E2%80%94_statistics_on_cities,_towns

_and_suburbs_%E2%80%94_smart_cities

What a Smart City is (2)

5 http://www.slideshare.net/srujanirulzzworld/smart-cities-54021321

How to understand a City: First Law of Geography

6

This is also expressed as an

inverse Power Law:

1/d2

http://geohealthinnovations.org/wp-

content/uploads/2013/01/toblerquote.png

Gravity Model …

7

Take Newton’s second law of motion – force is

proportional to mass times acceleration as F12

~ M 1 M 2 / (d 2)12 – and apply to Cities.

What is the Mass of the City? its population!

What we get? The GRAVITATION MODEL

Tij = k Pi Pj / (cij)2

Where k is a gravitational costant

Cij is a measure of costs for traveling from i to j

Excepts from http://www.spatialcomplexity.info/files/2011/10/Spatial-Complexity-Lecture-6.pdf

Rome was by far the largest City of the Empire (and in the world)

All the economy was built around it.

It was a kind of magnet, attracting business from every part of the empire

The city developed huge logistics, transportation and water systems to support itself

The City and Its Ecosystem –Ancient Rome

8Do you want to see more ? http://www.slideshare.net/mfresnillo/roman-architecture-398210

Big City > 1 M inhabitants

Good construction technologies

A Large Transport System

Il Porto di Ostia Antica e la Citta Ideale

9 10/3/2015

L'autrice dell'opera di ricostruzione del porto antico è

Viviana Meucci (Viviana Meucci: www.focemicina.it)

La citta ideale

Turin – Milan < 50 min

Milan – Rome < 3 hours

1/d2 is substituted by 1/t2

Cities have now comparable «Mass»

And are well spread in the territory and are within acceptable parameter of connectedness

But what is happening now between Cities ?

10 10/3/2015

Who is actracting whom?

From the Gravity to the Radiation Model

11

Simini, F., González, M. C., Maritan, A., & Barabási, A. L. (2012). A universal model for mobility and migration patterns. Nature, 484(7392), 96-100.Available at https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1111/1111.0586.pdf

Networks of Smart Cities (and Teritories)

12

Each City has to be a hub for

connectedness and services

available over a large covered

and interconnected territory

http://chorally.com/learn-impact-smartcity-using-social-networks-analysis/

Actually a (Smart) City is a Complex System [interacting with other Complex Systems]

Michael Batty in “Cities as Complex Systems: Scaling, Interactions, Networks, Dynamics and Urban Morphologies” available at http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/15183/1/15183.pdf

Luis Bettencourt: Cities as Complex Systems available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTZ6onbPjWk

– Heterogeneity: diversity of people and Organizations

– Interconnectivity: Everything is connected in Networks

– Scaling: Cities of different sizes have different problems

– Circular - Causality: Cause and Effect are mixed

– Development: Cities change in open-ended ways

10/3/201513

The impact of technologies on the City:The Freedom Bridge example

14

Every day in Venice almost 200 K people are in

the city, even if only less than 60Kof Venice live in

here

It is more than 140K transits: it is not only tourists,

it is commuters: students and workers.

A lot of people have left the city for the mainland.

And the city has lost not only citizens, but also a

part of its identity.

How this happened ? Because of a Bridge!!!

The Liberty Bridge has introduced a «Semiotic

breakdown»: instead of bringing in modernization,

it has brought to the «simbolization» of Venice

(i.e., it is a postcard)

http://www.linkiesta.it/blogs/cultura-rete-il-blog-di-venezia-2019-salone-

europeo-della-cultura/l-alba-di-una-nuova-venezia-

Ponte della Libertà, i.e., the Freedom Bridge

Wikipedia: Ponte della Libertà is a road bridge connecting the historical center of the city of Venice to

the mainland.

Designed in 1932 by engineer Eugenio Miozzi, and opened by Benito Mussolini in 1933 as Ponte

Littorio, the bridge is the only access for road vehicles to the historical center. It is built alongside the

Venice Railroad Bridge, which was constructed in 1846 by Austrian, with two tracks each way, and is

still in use.

The Quest For Data

15

https://datavisualization.ch/wp-

content/uploads/2010/05/cph_wheel_04.png

How do we understand and reason about Cities ?

16

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2573850?seq=1#

page_scan_tab_contents

How do we get Data ? Open Data

17

On Open Data

It’s a first step … but we need other data to really «measure» a city

A Measurable City is made out of thousands of information coming from Databases, or generated in Real-Time typically by Sensors that provide millions of data per second

Data may be:

– Events

– Continuous flows of simple data

– Update to existing data bases

– … 18

How do we get the data then?

19

Sensors

Internet of Things + BigData

What Internet of Things is

Aggregator/Gateway

Internet

Service Service Service

Events

Aggregator/GatewayEvents

Interworking

Interworking

Com

m. C

om

m.

Usage

Vertical

Interoperability

Sensors Sensors

Com

mands

Com

mands

& Actuators & Actuators

Need for data – Seoul Garbage

21

Need for data – Counting people without infringing Privacy in Venice

22

The Future Centre in Venice worked at the

monitoring in quasi real-time on the pedestrian

flows in the city center. The goal was to measure

the pedestrian traffic and keeping the anonymity

and privacy of users. The project has been using

low-cost sensors and devices (50-100 euros)

with a small size (two cigarette packs) in order to

acquire video flows of passing-by people and to

process it locally without any leak or privacy

violation. These devices will provide their Id, the

time and the number of people that have been

detected Ideally these objects could be

scattered in many places of the city and freely

transit their data (e.g., through twitter). In such a

way, interested developers could crate new

applications based on these data..

person-counter: simulation based on real data

Is it a person

or a shadow ?

Need for Data - SF Parking system

23

Managing in a

dynamic ways the

tariffs can change

the traffic

patterns!!!

http://sfpark.org/how-it-works/

Some Issues

24 10/3/2015

Open Up Is Dangerous

25

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/27/new-york-

taxi-details-anonymised-data-researchers-warn

Source: Beecham Research

Smart City: Application Domains and Fragmentation!!!

The Vertical vs. Horizontal platform challenge

SMART CITY

What Internet of Things really is

Service Service ServiceUsage

Different Administrative Domains

Networking

Virtualization

Data harmonization

Data Distribution

Networking

Virtualization

Data harmonization

Data Distribution

In

terw

orkin

g

Networking

Virtualization

Data harmonization

Data Distribution

Networking

Virtualization

Data harmonization

Data Distribution

In

terw

orkin

g Horizontal

Interoperability

The Open Factory

– Immagine a Chemical plant close to a city

– Who are the people more keen to check the security of the plant?

Citizen

– Why don’t open up some VALUES to people ?

Data is power!And nobody wants to share power

28

Social Sensor: but users didn’t want to share!

29

People have more and more the possibility to monitor important parameters of their home or of the

surrounding environment. Taking as an example the web site http://bwired.nl/, each user could have a

number of sensors monitoring and measuring parameters related to the functioning of the home or its

surroundings (e.g., the local outside temperature, the humidity, or even some parameters related to

pollution, noise and others).

The service is intended for collecting the wealth of user generated data, to anonymize them, and to

elaborate them for benefits of an entire community or for describing its own behavior (e.g., to calculate

a medium or average value for some parameters and allow each citizen to compare his own set of

parameters with the “average set of values” - for instance those that describe virtuous citizen

behavior with respect to a proper power consumption footprint). The availability of these data could

ignite a sort of game towards particularly good behaviors (power consumption is a good example).

Another possible usage is related to the integration of user generated data in such a way to compare

data and parameter directly collected by citizen versus official data provided by the public

administration. One important case could be the one of control of local pollution vs. the official data

monitored in particular area of big cities (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=air-

pollution-monitoring-sensor-asthma-black-carbon).

(Social) Cooperation is very important

A fundamental aspect of all adaptive systems is cooperation.

Natural selection favors cooperation, if the benefit of the altruistic act, b, divided by the cost, c, exceeds the average number of neighbors, k, which means b/c > k.

It is necessary enforcing altruistic behaviors in IoT networks (social aspects on it)

Hisashi Ohtsuki, “A simple rule for the evolution of cooperation

on graphs and social networks”, Nature, Letters, Vol 441|25 May 2006|doi:10.1038/nature04605

The Socialization Challenge of IoT

Communications Technologies for IoT (some)

Requirements associated with M2M and IoT:

• low cost,

• low power,

• compact form factors,

• rapid connection setup times,

• massively scalable deployments

See more at: http://www.wi-fi.org/beacon/craig-mathias/wi-fi-and-the-internet-

of-things-much-more-than-you-think#sthash.rzxKXMiJ.dpuf

M2M

WSN

http://d3uifzcxlzuvqz.cloudfront.net/images/stories/content/handbooks/iot-handbook/communication-iot1.jpg

TSP/MSC Communication Networks and Services (ComNETS)

Deploying IoT System is

complex and expensive

IoT Data and … Identity of Things

Things have Identities (and Owners) People have Identities and use Things

Me

“My” Smart Thing

Identity Relation

Functional Relations(events and commands)

Personal Profiling

Who, Where, When, What, Why, …

Sensors

Identity Relation

Service Provider

Aggregating Data per Identity …

“OU

R”

Sm

art

Th

ing

s

Raw data to be

transformed into

Info

Personal Profiling

FunctionalProfiling

Who, Where, When, What, Why, …

+

Events and commands

* = Bigger

DATA

• Who is the Owner

of all these Data ?

• Who has the right

to extract info ?

50 B Devices *(Average Aggregated Traffic of M2M Devices)

~ 2MB/day = ~ 88.81 petabytes

/day

A long value chain opens up opportunities for many Actors

Source: Nokia Siemens Networks

«New»

Markets

Traditional

Markets

The Ecosystem Challenge

If money is in the

Platform, Many want

to have a platform

But IoT is technically Complex

API

Always Best Connected Comm.

Sensors

Things

Tag

Tags Others

App Ecosystem

Platform Value

Ecosystem Value

Service/AppsValue

ProgrammabilityValue

Processing

Storage

Communications

Comm Value

Communication Engine (e.g., event based)

Autonomics and Self Organization

Brokering of Virtual Objects

Data ManagementObjectsRegistry

Objectsmanagement

Extensive Objects Virtualization

API

Telco BuildingBlocks

Mo

bile

Dev

ice

Pla

tfo

rm

Native Operating

System

Middleware Functions

Terminal

to Cloud

Relationship

Terminal

to Capillary

Relationship

API

API

And there is the need to create a City platform …

Open

Accessible

Secure

Interoperable

Rich of services for all people «involved» with the city

With Shared goals and purposes (because a city is a complexsystem that we need to control for the good of everyone)

36

Stuff

37 10/3/2015

Where a Smart City ends ?

38

High Speed

Trains have

an impact on

two far away

cities

Journey < 2.5 h

Tag the City

39

The service allows a person or a service provider to tag places. Tagging

here means a virtual placemarker that describes a particular feature of a

place and pinpoint to a description available in the WWW. Tags can be

public (i.e., available to all) or private. Private tags are visible to a closed

user group and sometimes they can be viewed only if the user is paying

for a service or a single tag. Tags can be organized in such a way to

define a trail in the city. The preferred device category for dealing with

placemarkers are smartphones.

See What I See

40

An Object (being a person, a car, a truck

or other mobile objects) is moving in a

specific (e.g., an insecure area, a touristic

city, or others). The “See what I see

service” allows the object to be monitored

by means of the cooperation of available

objects along its route. Objects enforcing

some level of tracking could be simple

objects (e.g., proximity objects, RFID tags

or sensors that just record that the object

has just passed by) or more complex ones

(such as cameras that can record the

object passing by or even be able to

accompany that object for a short period –

movable cameras).

If the route is known in advance, objects

could be ready for the object passing by

without the need to guess where the object

is moving next. However for particularly

casual routes, a more dynamic allocation

of resources could be provided based on

prediction of possible movements and pre-

allocation of resources.