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The SCMS platform won two prestigious smart city awards for its pivotal role in the Ville de Laval smart lighting and dynamic signage panels project
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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:
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
1 – CORE FEATURES
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
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:
OPENNESS IN NETWORK CONNECTIVITY
Choosing a connectivity approach for a smart city application is complex. Multiple options are available, like:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
