and opportunities of urban-scale embedded systems in the public sphere, initially related to understanding and ultimately managing urban air quality.
Coruña Smart City: A Coruña, Spain
Coruña Smart City Platform aims to improve environmental quality (noise, air quality), reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the Smart management of energy and traffic and reduce consumption peaks in municipal infrastructures and buildings. Coruña Smart City project is promoted by the city council of A Coruña, Spain, and EMALCSA, the city’s public water company. Coruña Smart City is a unique smart city project that is based on the development of the City’s “brain,” a powerful and open technological platform that incorporates data, in real time, from multiple sensing devices/data sources located throughout the city. The real-time data generated by different “smart projects” in the city, can be viewed in the advanced 3D visualization tool, eVidens, which is the platform interface. The eVidens tool displays information about public works, water cycle management, weather stations, public transportation, traffic conditions, tourist information, attractions, etc. Several smart projects are being developed in different areas of the City for mobility, environment, leisure, tourism, and e-administration. These projects compound the “neurons” of Coruña Smart City, and their objective is to provide more rapid, efficient, and sustainable services to the citizens. A key component of the Coruña Smart City project is the availability and visualization of live and open data generated from the projects. Today all the public data can be consulted by citizens, enterprises, council operators, and authorities at the Coruña Smart City and Open Data web portals, and through different mobile apps. Future plans include transformation of the data into valuable information to improve decision-making and the citizens’ daily quality of life.
Smart Santander: Santander (Spain)
Santander (Spain) is one of the pioneers of IoT-enabled Smart Cities. With more than 15000 IoT devices deployed in the city, FIWARE is the platform providing access to real-time open data describing what is going on in the city. Part of this data comes from various verticals in the city, as traffic management, environmental control, public lighting management, noise, and many more. Additionally, it comes directly from citizens using the “Pace of the City” application, through which they report events related to the city context and provide data from their smartphone embedded sensors. Last but not least, it comes from devices embedded in the public bus fleet, parks and garden management fleet, a large number of taxis, and “intelligent tags” deployed in shops, touristic points, public transport stops, etc. All this real-time open data is made available to support development of smart city applications. Readings gathered from fixed and mobile sensors are used as the initial indicator of the severity of the environmental pollution (air quality, noise levels and luminosity levels) covering large areas. When levels over defined limits are observed, special alarms are generated by the system and actions triggered. IoT devices deployed in several green zones of the city, on the other hand, are devoted to monitor irrigation-related parameters such as moisture temperature and humidity, pluviometer, anemometer, in order to make irrigation as efficient as possible. Both are examples of the kind of smart city services developed in the city based on IoT-enabled context information.
