Jumpstarting an Integrated Township Operations Center (Smart City) Using People as Sensors

© 2015 IBM Corporation

Integrated Township Operations Center Jump-started by People as Sensors

Biplav Srivastava, Ullas Nambiar, Vikas Agarwal, Sumit Mittal Dec 2010

Instrumented Interconnected Intelligent Smarter


Helping build a smarter planet

Motivation and Problem

§  An integrated township has elements of multiple domains like traffic, water, energy, public safety and health.

§  Benefit Possible: • Getting a composite view helps administrators make timely decisions •  Helps optimize resources across domains (Smarter cities value)

§  Problem: • Getting data from instrumentation is costly, slow, noisy, insufficient and error-prone • Once data is obtained, getting interconnection right is complicated • Getting integration across domains is hard, given the challenges with physical sensors • Time to value is too long and subject to too many variables, including physical limitations

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Solution Idea and Advantages

§  Idea –  Ask people to give information about sensing information in different domains in a uniform,

structured manner –  Exact affected domains can be inferred –  Status of individual and across domains is updated –  Jumpstarts integration while physical sensors are integrated in parallel

§  Advantages –  Expedites time to value –  Improves acceptance of solution –  Integration issues are removed while physical sensors are tested/ integrated separately

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Mockup

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City: <My Town> Date: <6 Sep 2010> Time: <Local Time>

Name: <Manish Nambiar> Role: <Town Mayor>

Town Monitor

Safety

Traffic

Energy

Water

Health

Overall

Situation: •  Water leakage in some region •  People are agitated •  Electricity has to be cut off to help repairs •  Sanitation issues •  Traffic unaffected

Town Context: •  Class 2 city in India •  State utilities provide basic amenities •  Limited budget, need to show early results



Format for Entering Information

§  Location: [Pre-defined list of city regions auto-completed based on first-few letters] §  Domain: [Traffic, Water, Energy, Public Safety, Health] §  Status: [Red, Yellow, Green, Unknown] + <Optional data>

–  Optional data can be speed in traffic, kw-hour in energy, etc. –  Depending on device capability, it can be audio, image or video as well.

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Uniform Manner of Asking Inputs from Crowd and Inference

Unknown (Gray)

Green Yellow Red

Unknown (Gray) Unknown (Gray) Unknown (Gray) Unknown (Gray) Unknown (Gray)

Green Unknown (Gray) Green Yellow Red

Yellow Unknown (Gray) Yellow Yellow Red

Red Unknown (Gray) Red Red Red

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Levels for status for a domain in highest to lowest order: •  4-level example: Unknown, Green, Yellow, Red •  Semantic based on domain

• Semantics for traffic = unknown speed, free flow, slow traffic and congested traffic • Semantics for water = unknown pressure, high pressure, medium pressure and no/ low pressure • Semantics for energy= unknown supply, high availability, supply limited and power outage • Semantics for safety= unknown, no incidents, minor incidents and major incident(s) reported • Semantics for health= unknown status, hospital beds available, beds limited and no bed availability

Inferring composite status across domains: •  Conservative aggregation: If level-1 and level-2 are status levels for two domains, composite level = min(level-1, level-2) •  Majority aggregation: aggregate level is the level of the maximum number of domains

Illustration of conservative aggregation



Some Scenario Details

Actors Information uploaded

Information sent

Safety Citizens, Police personnel Text (incident), Video, Audio

Text (advisory)

Traffic Citizens, Municipal workers, Police personnel

Text (speed, condition), Video, Audio

Text (advisory)

Energy Citizens, Energy utility personnel

Text (outage) Text (advisory)

Water Citizens, Water utility personnel

Text (outage) Text (advisory)

Health Citizens, Hospital contact Text (condition) Text (advisory)

Overall Administrative heads, emergency management personnel

Text (instructions), Video, Audio

Text (advisory)

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Technology

Jumpstarting an Integrated Township Operations Center (Smart City) Using People as Sensors