to coalesce around shared challenges (e.g., air pollution, traffic management, emergency response) to create teams called “Action Clusters.” Each Action Cluster creates a project plan with a timeline to demonstrate their accomplishments in a tangible manner. Because each action cluster includes multiple members, it is likely that the outcome of the solution will be replicable to other cities. In the case that a team has only one municipal partner, the team is encouraged to establish additional partnerships with other cities by demonstrating measurable and quantifiable benefits of the solution. It is also important to note that replicability and interoperability should be based on collaboration that is global rather than just regional.
Figure 2: GCTC Approach
Cities have two strong reasons for participating in GCTC.
For the cities that have already gone through successful
deployments, it is an opportunity to promote their solutions and
be the origin of replication for other cities that are facing
similar challenges. For the cities that are just starting to
consider the deployment of smart city solutions, it is an
opportunity to learn from other cities’ projects and to showcase
their own city as a ready partner to organizations with
replicable smart city technologies.
For corporations, GCTC is an opportunity to identify new
business partners, demonstrate their proven solutions, and
enlarge their market.
Academic institutions participate in order to find
opportunities for joint R&D with cities/communities and
partners that will enable the joint development and deployment
of new technologies. The process also allows researchers to
identify key common characteristics and components among
different applications and implementations, which will help the
market to find convergence on best practices and eventually
lead to broadly adopted standards.
B. GCTC 2015
The first round of GCTC culminated on June 1, 2015, after
a nine-month-long process of team building, incubation,
solution development, and deployment. More than 60 teams,
composed of over 200 organizations and three dozen
cities/communities around the world, gathered at the National
Building Museum in Washington, D.C., to present and
demonstrate the impact of their smart city solutions. Many
high-profile visitors and speakers, including King WillemAlexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands and U.S.
Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx, came to celebrate
and encourage the teams’ accomplishments. The event was
attended by over 1300 people and was covered by many media
outlets.
C. GCTC 2016-2017
Based on the success of GCTC 2015, the next round was
launched in November 2015. This new GCTC round is
composed of two phases. The first phase will continue until
June 2016, with the focus on building the teams and defining
the project goals, timelines, and Key Performance Indicators
(KPI) of the quantifiable impacts to residents and citizens.
Participants will demonstrate and pilot the solutions and will
build partnerships with as many cities as possible. The second
phase will focus on deploying the solutions, achieving the
goals (based on the KPIs devised during Phase 1), and
measuring the impacts. Phase 2 will culminate in June 2017.
GCTC 2016-2017 carries over the key elements of GCTC
2015, and adds two more ambitious goals, encouraging the
teams to:
- deploy the shared and replicable solutions in multiple cities, potentially on multiple continents and
- provide tangible measurements of the improvements made by the solutions, such as reduction of average commute time, reduction of air pollution, reduction of water loss.
V. Further Discussions: IoT Smart City Fabric
One of the missing links in accelerating the deployment of
IoT/CPS and smart city solutions is the lack of a “connectivity
fabric”--a commonly shared IoT/CPS network infrastructure
among cities and communities [1]. As of today, there is no easy
mechanism for an IoT solution to be deployed and become
operational in a plug-and-play manner. For example, a simple
flood-level sensor deployed in one city may not share the same
backbone infrastructure required to exchange data with sensors
in other cities. The current landscape of IoT and smart city is
similar to that of the communications infrastructure of preInternet days.
It is essential that a communications fabric infrastructure be
developed that can enable IoT devices and smart city solutions
to identify and communicate in a plug-and-play manner, to
create synergy between sectors, to reduce overhead, and to
catalyze the mass adoption of affordable solutions by the
residents in cities and communities. The IoT/Smart City fabric
would enable sharing and replication of the solutions beyond
the city limit, just as the Internet broke the physical-distance
barrier for communications and commerce. Combined with
multi-stakeholder collaboration programs such as GCTC, the
IoT/Smart City fabric—built to be open and neutral--could
allow many cities and communities, large and small, to enjoy
- ↑ S. Rhee, G. Mulligan, “SmartAmerica Challenge,” 2013-2014, p. 6. http://www.nist.gov/el/upload/Smart-America-Challenge-r1-25p.pdf
