Key Criteria to Choose a Smart City System

Choosing a Smart City System

Choosing a smart city system does not have to be a complex project in itself. With multiple components that are offered by many manufacturers, how does one identify the key criteria to compare when analyzing different smart city systems? An analyst brief from the consulting firm IDC recommended identifying your objectives first. What are your city’s, your utility’s or your company’s objectives? What are your citizens’ or your clients’ needs?

Ideally, this strategy should consider immediate and long term needs, as well as the types of processes or technologies needed to accomplish the strategy’s objectives. Identifying these will enable you to plan investments in exactly the right type of infrastructure.

For example, a city that needs to increase the level of security in its streets at night, while also looking to create a more eco-friendly environment will want to invest in proper light coverage at night with high efficiency lights. This naturally leads to changing the legacy street lights for newer light technologies that provide energy consumption reports. This can only be achieved by smart street lighting solutions, an IoT infrastructure specifically designed to remotely manage connected street lights.

The input of an all-in-one smart city system supplier is invaluable at this point. Many objectives can be met by leveraging the right smart city applications. For example, connecting the already highly efficient street lights to a central management platform through smart controllers allows leveraging the street light infrastructure for a wide range of objectives:

Enhancing public security and reducing crime by lighting up specific commercial areas after hours,
Detecting environmental quality indicators such as hotspots or gas,
Tracking and analyzing traffic flows and parking availability.

It is interesting to note that very few can offer a real-life demonstration of a large-wide deployment when requested. It is important to see the solution with one’s own eyes and knowing what criteria to seek out before investing in a smart city solution.

3 Key Criteria to Consider When Choosing a Smart City System

Core features
Interoperability and openness
Future readiness and scalability

1 – CORE FEATURES

Every smart city system is different, but most offer similar core features. Core features are usually specific to the foundational smart city application that will serve as a backbone of your smart city system. For smart street lighting systems, these include the following:

Controlling streetlights remotely (manually and through scheduling),
Energy monitoring and billing,
Performance monitoring,
Adaptive lighting,
Maintenance module that allows to create tickets, work orders and to assign them to crews,
Enabling other smart city applications (smart parking management, image recognition, sound detection, environmental monitoring, etc.).

2 – INTEROPERABILITY AND OPENNESS

Interoperability means the ability of a system or its elements to work with third party systems or their elements (specific hardware, networks or software). This is key to any smart city system. It ensures that a city is not dependent on any single supplier for all of its critical systems and creates additional value when the different systems work together.

The McKinsey Global Institute calculated that interoperability is required for capturing 40 % of potential value across IoT applications. It also predicts that by vastly increasing the value of IoT applications in urban settings, interoperability will encourage many more cities to adopt them.

Openness is sometimes used in a broader sense, e.g. offering several options to a customer instead of just one. This section will address interoperability and openness in the broader sense of the word.

Because interoperability and openness are so important, every supplier on the market claims that their system is open. They are usually right, albeit sometimes only in a limited way. Systems can however be open in many different ways. While some systems are more open than others, no single system on the market is perfectly open.

It is important to understand in which ways systems can be open, and decide which aspects are the most important for your needs. Let’s have a look at a few common ways in which systems can be open:

Openness in hardware and controls,
Openness in network connectivity,
Openness in software.

OPENNESS IN HARDWARE AND CONTROLS

E.g. end devices like wireless smart lighting nodes, parking meters, environmental sensors, cameras, sound detection sensors.

When investing in a smart street lighting solution as the foundation of a smart city platform, choosing an open system is crucial. You will want to use it as a backbone for other systems and applications in the future and connect the system to:

Different brands of lights; legacy as well as new lights,
Different controls and sensors from various manufacturers onto the same lights depending on the area or over time.

OPENNESS IN NETWORK CONNECTIVITY

Choosing a connectivity approach for a smart city application is complex. Multiple options are available, like:

Power line,
Cellular,
Wi-Fi,
Mesh and low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs),
Other proprietary and public protocols.

There are many factors to consider, such as the different network options for smart city street lighting installations. We will provide a detailed comparison of each connectivity option in a later article. The IT consulting company, Gartner, repeatedly emphasizes that because street lights are ubiquitous, they are the logical choice for being the backbone of a citywide network for smart city applications. This makes it particularly important to think about your connectivity options when choosing a smart street lighting system – you will probably be leveraging this connectivity for other applications as well.

Here are some ways in which a smart city system can be open with regards to connectivity:

Different types of network connectivity,
Able to scale cost-effectively.

OPENNESS IN SOFTWARE

The software component is an important piece of the Smart City puzzle. Great software helps generate awareness by making sense of the many data points generated by connected devices, as well as manage these devices to achieve higher efficiency. Software is also critical in unlocking additional value through interoperability with other smart city applications and systems.

Here are some ways the software element of a smart city system can be open:

Open to other hardware and systems manufacturers,
Open to various hosting models,
Open to data exchange and interactions with 3rd party applications through open APIs.

3 – FUTURE READINESS

Future readiness is another major concern when choosing a smart city system. Like any large infrastructure project, the system becomes a foundation for many services, for many years. It is essential to think through the kind of technologies it should be able to support. And while we cannot predict the future, we can offer some pointers on what to look for in a smart city system to ensure that it is future proof.

Hardware is usually a significant part of the overall investment in a smart city system, as well as the most visible.

Here are some criteria to consider when choosing smart city system hardware with a view to the future:

Future readiness in hardware (devices, sensors and controls),
Future-proof technology standard,
Sensor readiness,
OTA bidirectional communication and upgradability,
Intelligent firmware.

Being future proof is usually not the first criterion that comes to mind when deciding on the type of network connectivity for its smart city system. Sometimes it is decided on by default because it is offered bundled within the supplier’s solution. However, with some connectivity standards becoming obsolete and others cost-prohibitive, here are some important aspects to consider:

Future-proof connectivity standard,
Future-proof bandwidth,
Future readiness in software connectivity,
Scalability,
Support for future applications,
Easy and time-sensitive updates,
Security.

After identifying the required core features, openness and future readiness are two critical criteria to consider thoroughly before buying any smart city system. They can be applied to the various elements of smart city systems, such as hardware, devices, controls, network connectivity and software. The resulting summary table can be used when comparing offers from different vendors or putting together an RFP.