Smart Cities Innovation through Collaboration
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Contents Forewords 06 Rt Hon David Cameron MP
10 Dr Ruth McKernan CBE
07 Lord Erroll
11 Peter Madden OBE
08 Justin Anderson
12 Les Pyle
09 Mark Prisk MP
13 Simon Michell
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Chair, Hypercat Alliance Advisory Board
Executive chairman, Flexeye
Chair, House of Commons Smart Cities All-Party Parliamentary Group
Chief executive, Innovate UK
Chief executive, Future Cities Catapult
Chief executive, Institute for Collaborative Working
Editor
The Hypercat Alliance 14 Understanding the Hypercat Alliance
The origins of Hypercat and how its project will release the potential to create innovative smart city value webs
17 Hypercat: the concept
How the Hypercat digital catalogue system helps to connect different entities on the Internet of Things
20 What is the Internet of Things?
Explaining the Internet of Things and the role that Hypercat is playing in making it better
24 From Hypercat to Hyperspace: the Spearhead projects
A look at the smart demonstrators that were launched by Hypercat in spring 2015
27 Working with Hypercat
How the Hypercat specification is helping companies transform their day-to-day business operations
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Delivering smart cities 30 Delivering happiness
Professor Simon Anholt on why smart cities need to make a positive contribution beyond benefits for their own citizens
33 Seeing the light
How the European Union’s Humble Lamppost initiative could provide the key to the future development of smart cities
Contents
INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
36 Taking a lead in happiness
Highlighting the importance of leadership in the development of a smart city where happiness is an end in itself
39 Maintaining standards
Why common standards are crucial for the UK smart city revolution and how they could generate massive savings
42 Collaboration is key
Barry Sheerman MP explains how a greater focus on collaboration will help the evolution of smart cities
44 Funding matters: following the money
Reporting on the smart city investment that is already being made in the UK and across Europe
47 Smart customers
Tracing the route towards quadruple helix-based smart communities in the UK
50 The essence of open data
A look at the changes ahead as a new strategy for data in London aims to bring the city’s smart ecosystem online
53 Security by design
Symantec’s Darren Thompson explains how future technologies will have security at their core
55 Developing smart city ecosystems
Revealing the potential of the Internet of Things to drive new ideas and assessing the value of opening up data resources
Smart city sectors 57 Smart government
Examining the impact of the UK Government’s “digital by default” policy on the work of ministries and the civil service
60 Smart urban mobility
How future vehicles and their technologies will enhance safety, reduce emissions and ease congestion
63 Keeping the streets safe
A review of the latest innovations in smart city safety and security technologies
66 The power of smart grids
How developments in demand management are shaping the future of electricity supply
69 Big data in action
Looking at ways in which big data could change the face of energy consumption in the built environment
71 Smart water
The water industry’s traditional model of vertical integration is being transformed by the introduction of smart systems
74 A byte of the apple
A look at an innovative research project in Bristol that will help to improve the way we look after our health in the future
UK smart cities 77 Smart London
Professor David Gann, chair of the Smart London Board, reveals how the city is addressing the smart challenge
80 The Canary Wharf test bed
How one of the world’s most advanced developments is being future-proofed with smart city technologies
83 Old Oak Common and Park Royal
Reviewing progress at the UK’s largest regeneration project
86 Making Milton Keynes smarter
Exploring the Buckinghamshire city’s MK:Smart programme
89 Bristol Is Open
How new digital technology is being used to develop the city
92 Partner organisations
A directory of Hypercat Alliance members 5
Foreword
SMART CITIES
Rt Hon David Cameron MP Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
C
ities around the world are growing incredibly fast, with more than seven billion people predicted to live in them by 2050. This trend represents a fantastic opportunity for more people on our planet to access the higher-paying jobs and better social services that are often found in urban areas. However, if this opportunity is to be realised then many of the world’s cities will need to work better than they do today — they will need to become Smart Cities. Increasingly, cities generate data on a range of topics, from air quality and energy usage to traffic flows and local economies. This rich material provides decision-makers with the opportunity to respond more effectively to the challenges of city life, and to develop efficient and resilient urban infrastructure. Here in the UK, we have the skills and knowledge to help develop smarter cities, both at home and abroad. UK companies deliver best practice in engineering, design, architecture, the digital economy, finance, legal services and insurance, and as the proud home to some of the best universities in the world we enjoy the benefits of a strong and growing research base. UK cities are driving innovation in intelligent mobility, connected healthcare and environmental sensing, including for flooding and air quality. Bristol and Milton Keynes in particular have shown a great appetite to trial new ideas and systems. Last year, Peterborough beat a number of major global cities, including Dubai and Buenos Aires, to win the City Award at the Global Smart City Expo in Barcelona. Meanwhile, London, Glasgow, Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester are finding new ways to use data and digital applications to address some of the major challenges they face. The Government has funded an urban innovation centre, the Future Cities Catapult, which is currently helping 20 UK cities and local authorities to better integrate services, and has already identified more than 32,000 companies in the UK that are offering solutions for the Smart Cities market. It is also partnering with the British Standards Institution to run the City Standards Institute, providing cities around the world with free online tools to help make better use of new technologies. In addition, we have provided the CityVerve project in Manchester with £10 million to test better services using Internet of Things technology, and share its results on healthcare, transport, energy and the environment with other cities across the UK. We are also delighted to support the Hypercat Alliance, which has made great strides since its establishment in 2014. With over 700 international technology companies and research organisations now involved in the project, Hypercat is demonstrating how new collaborations can deliver greater innovation for cities. I am confident that this publication, Smart Cities: Innovation through Collaboration, will help to promote their work and encourage greater urban innovation in the UK and abroad.
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Foreword
INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
Lord Erroll
Chair, Hypercat Alliance Advisory Board
Creating a fair and level playing field
T
he Hypercat Summit at the Royal Festival Hall in London is, for me, the culmination of a period of intense activity over the past few years, focused on bringing the Hypercat Alliance and its Hypercat catalogue to prominence, not just in the United Kingdom, but also throughout Europe, the Commonwealth and the wider world. This is a challenge I relish as, from the very earliest stage of my career, I have always been active in technology innovation. In addition to my business activities, my work with the Digital Policy Alliance (formerly EURIM) and the Parliamentary Internet, Technology and Communications Forum (PICTFOR) and has brought me an awareness of the need to keep a close eye on all things digital to ensure that we are developing an eco-system that is fair, transparent and trustworthy. However, working with the Hypercat Alliance has also given me the opportunity to broaden these key facets and promote responsible governance that ensures that everyone and every organisation is able to enjoy equal opportunities within the digital world. As an independent member of the House of Lords, I have been able to ask those difficult questions and, in doing so, press for this level playing field that is so essential to all of us and to innovation.
Smart cities: a journey into Hyperspace The Internet of Things (IoT) is evolving rapidly and creating massive opportunities that will benefit society and the business world. It is establishing the foundations for the smart city revolution that we are beginning to see emerge all around us. But we know to our cost that, in order for these types of eco-systems to truly flourish, they need to be built upon layers of interoperability that are implemented at the beginning of the development process, and not retrofitted after everything has been installed. This is why being chair of the Hypercat Alliance Advisory Board is such a privilege. We are embarked on a journey that is going to have massive consequences for mankind across the entire globe, and the Hypercat Alliance is ideally placed to be the catalyst that sparks the revolution. Open standards are all very well, but we have to transform concepts and visions into commercial opportunities for all. There is no point in creating a mechanism that nobody uses. We are all evangelists for Hypercat and its move into Hyperspace – the next phase of our journey. Hyperspace is where we bring the power of collaboration and innovation to the fore. It is all about accelerating and increasing innovation by making the whole process easier: easier to find the data, easier to bring it together, easier to turn it into new applications and services. This is where we open up the value chain to enable the whole range of players – start-ups, SMEs, corporations and entrepreneurs – to commercialise the eco-system and attract the much-needed investment that will enable the Hypercat vision.
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Foreword
SMART CITIES
Justin Anderson Executive chairman, Flexeye
I
’ve lived at the heart of the technology maelstrom since I first entered the computer room at the University of Exeter, aged eight. I’ve worked with technology start-ups and the world’s largest companies, government agencies and industry bodies. I’ve enjoyed watching the magic of innovation unfolding every day, and I’ve felt its continuous melodic move from the product of the single-minded genius to the product of collaborations working across the boundaries of organisations and constantly building on the previous layer of innovation. The Hypercat Alliance is a great example of this collaborative innovation. It’s core aim is to inspire business and government to use connected technologies to design and build new products and services, and to unleash the inherent added value of trillions of pounds. The technologies will further transform the way we will live, move and work. Through collaborating and evangelising about what works, we are accelerating demand across the planet. How these technologies are deployed will be critical for our future and for the future of our next generation. We must build them in ways that allow for a constant evolution of new components to be seamlessly incorporated. We must build them so that we are not locked in to any single closed set of systems. We must build them openly so that innovation flourishes and mankind and our planet become the beneficiaries. The Hypercat Alliance has been part-funded by Innovate UK, which has supported the development of a set of ‘Spearhead’ projects that all speak the same language; they are interoperable. By combining these subsystems, we create new ‘value webs’ that can both enhance existing products and services and deliver new ones. A ‘value web’ is an interoperable and virtual value chain running across the world wide web, using different components to manage inputs, transformation processes and outputs, generating impact over and above that of their sum. We call this combination of Hypercat-enabled components ‘Hyperspace’. In common English, this term is used in to describe either a space of more than three dimensions or a notional space-time continuum in which it is possible to travel faster than light. A value web of Hypercatenabled components’ exhibits rather similar properties. Using sensors and actuators, Hyperspace connects things in the real world to digital representations (like an avatar) of things in the virtual world. This can enable you to monitor and manage the world around you in a more efficient way, or allow these things to monitor one another, reducing the need to worry about them at all. For example, Hyperspace can help to optimise the performance of a water system, reduce the maintenance costs of a rail network, predict the required energy usage in a building or improve the traffic flow of a public highway. Components can be plugged into a value web and provide services to multiple systems, driving new economies of scale. A value web is more resilient and able to evolve using new best-of-breed components in a way that many end-to-end (or silo) systems are unable to today. It also avoids lock-in to any single vendor, ensuring a competitive and collaborative market place for innovation. The Hypercat Alliance, which is now chaired by an advisory board that includes Axillium, BT, CISCO, Flexeye, KPMG, Symantec and WSP, has rapidly captured the interest of thousands of developers and data owners, and is recognised as a viable ecosystem able to encourage collaborative innovation. It is growing globally and has operations across the world, including in India and Australia. It is building the future, together.
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Foreword
INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
Mark Prisk MP
Chair of the House of Commons Smart Cities All-Party Parliamentary Group
Collaboration is the key
W
hat do we mean by smart cities? Just more technology for people to plan their day, or could it help make the whole city a better place in which to live? If we are to make the most of this opportunity, we have to recognise that it is about more than changing technology – it is about changing mindsets. First, until we get businesses actively involved in supporting smart cities, we are going to struggle to get the synergy we need. Collaboration is the key, between the public and private sectors and between businesses. Take local transport, for example. Open public data creates value. If businesses create open applications then everyone benefits – from cutting congestion, lowering pollution and carbon emissions to giving workers more flexibility. Collaboration is also vital within City Hall. This requires all departments to share responsibility for change. If councils simply establish a separate ‘smart cities office’ then the rest of City Hall will assume it is not their problem. And nothing will happen. Instead, everyone needs to embrace the change, with all departments working in unison. But it doesn’t stop there. Mayors and the rest of City Hall need to actively engage the wider public, and not just at election time. I realise that continuous citizen participation is never going to be practical or realistic. This doesn’t mean, however, that individual citizens cannot make a difference. Rather, we need to enable people to participate from end to end, from determining the overall priorities to setting the outcomes people want and shaping the delivery of the new integrated services. Finally, we at a national level must contribute. Governments must provide the framework for local government and civic bodies to initiate smart city projects. That is why plans by the government for greater devolution matter. Only by decentralising power to local people will they feel that they can truly shape their community. Smart city thinking is therefore a challenge – not just for technologists, but for us all. Only a holistic approach from within city administrations, coupled with the active engagement of the public will help to deliver the outcomes we all want. This new collaborative approach is the best way forward.
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Foreword
SMART CITIES
Dr Ruth McKernan CBE Chief executive, Innovate UK
Proud supporter of Hypercat
T
he United Kingdom is at the forefront of global innovation and change across our industries – from lightweight chassis designs, developed in Formula One and applied to everyday vehicles, to ‘agribots’ that help farmers manage their stock across hilly moorlands. Organisations are searching for innovation and striving to engage in collaboration beyond their traditional boundaries as disruptive digital innovation and technologies evolve. Examples include the Internet of Things (IoT), quantum computing and distributed ledger – technologies that change the way non-digital industries operate. This disruptive innovation requires leadership. Innovate UK is a transformative agent of change, driving and accelerating productivity in the UK economy. The IoT is transforming the way we live and work. We benefit from better monitoring and insights that help manage our health and wellbeing as we get older. Manufacturing facilities can predict equipment failures and required maintenance in order to reduce downtime. One of the aims outlined in Innovate UK’s five-point plan is to accelerate economic growth through innovative start-ups and small businesses. The IoT provides these types of businesses with an exciting opportunity to demonstrate easily achievable value in key market sectors and industries. The high growth in digital empowerment we are seeing globally provides businesses with the ability to adopt these new technologies. Hypercat is a unique collaboration between over 30 different organisations. Funded by Innovate UK in 2012, Hypercat is an ideal mechanism by which businesses, academia and the voluntary and public sectors can quickly understand the value that exists in working both within and across industries. It is an easy way for any organisation to get involved in the IoT and be part of a fast-growing, worldwide market. Innovate UK’s vision is to help the UK economy grow head and shoulders above other countries by inspiring and supporting pioneering UK businesses to create the industries of the future, and to shine on the global stage. That is why Innovate UK is a proud supporter of Hypercat and its aims of creating a vibrant and inclusive global community of innovators to help deliver value with the IoT.
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Foreword
INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
Peter Madden OBE
Chief executive, Future Cities Catapult
Better connected
O
ur cities need to be better connected to meet the demands of the future. As the world rapidly urbanises, city infrastructure has to work harder to satisfy the needs of the population. But full-scale overhaul of hard infrastructure — from power networks to transport systems — is slow and expensive. There is another way to meet increasing demand. By digitally connecting urban infrastructure, it is possible to gain a better understanding of usage, predict how resources must be allocated in the future, share the load between different systems and even encourage people to shift their habits to decrease demand. This idea lies squarely within the vision of the smart city: a more intelligent, connected space, where digital systems create an urban realm that understands its surroundings and uses resources more effectively. There was, of course, a surge of enthusiasm for smart cities and integrated urban solutions around 20 years ago, which led to many disappointing projects. Then, technology was seen as a panacea, but cities and providers have both since learned that’s not the case. Now, with advancing technological capabilities, increased understanding about what innovation can achieve and a growing respect for collaboration, we are seeing a new vision of the smart city, where appropriate technology is used to solve specific city problems. At Future Cities Catapult, we help UK companies to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable places through intelligent use of new technologies and processes. Over the past year, we have been proud to work with Hypercat to do just that, as it has developed new standards for the Internet of Things (IoT). These will make it easier for devices to connect and communicate with each other, so that they can be used to help make cities more efficient. Hypercat takes a very similar approach to Future Cities Catapult. First, it is working with a diverse range of organisations in building solutions that span sectors, to improve city services by understanding how they work together. Second, it is developing standards of best practice that will help guide cities around the world in sharing and adopting new ways of using IoT technology to improve the urban realm. Finally, it is already putting its work to exciting practical use in applications such as smart highways and intelligent car parking. It is an approach echoed in many of our own projects. Our Smart Campus project with the University of Glasgow, for instance, can help a large educational establishment run more efficiently by modifying its infrastructure to work together — so waste systems feed on to renewable energy production and city-wide sensing provides vital information to tailor transport and teaching. Meanwhile, our Cities Standards Institute is laying the foundations for a robust set of coherent standards for urban innovation, which will create the right conditions for the future cities market to flourish in the UK and beyond. Also, our Sensing Cities project is providing realworld test beds around London for new services focused on air quality and pedestrian activity. At the heart of all these projects, of course, lies the unifying theme of collaboration. These problems are too big and complex for a single organisation to solve. The only way we will build a truly smart city is by working together — as Hypercat and Future Cities Catapult well know.
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Foreword
SMART CITIES
Les Pyle
Chief executive, Institute for Collaborative Working
Smart cities: innovation from collaboration
N
umerous studies have identified the important business correlation between innovation and collaboration. These suggest that effective collaborative working is fundamental to delivering novel answers to tomorrow’s challenges by fostering the sharing of innovative ideas. Indeed, a survey by Warwick University Business School identified innovation as the most important outcome from effective collaborative business relationships – way ahead of cost reduction. Establishing a collaborative environment in which intellectual property is respected, while allowing knowledge, expertise and insight to be shared between individuals, teams and organisations would appear to be the foundation for innovation. Effective collaborative working helps to set the playing field between interested parties, irrespective of size, to encourage an open knowledge-sharing relationship. Traditional noncollaborative business relationships tend to be dominated by the client, particularly when the client is the larger party. While this master-servant approach may deliver the agreed purpose, it does little to encourage a sharing, open, innovative relationship and stifles the exploration of new ideas that are so important to moving the business forward. Given that many innovative ideas have their genesis in smaller organisations, this is clearly a major lost opportunity. Creating the right climate to establish an effective collaborative business relationship doesn’t simply happen because someone says so; it requires substance behind the words and a rigorous approach. There are three key issues to consider: Leadership – successful collaborative working requires commitment to invest in the issues that will make the relationship work. Leaders need to commit to the necessary investment in the issues that underpin effective collaborative working – process and attitude, primarily. Process – effective collaborative working needs to be based on a good practice process that is fully understood and committed to by the parties involved. Such a process exists with the British Standard for Collaborative Working – BS 11000, soon to be adopted by the International Standards Organisation as ISO 11000. This framework is the embodiment of good practice experience, drawn from hundreds of organisations over more than 20 years. It provides a common language to ensure mutual understanding across the life cycle of a business relationship. Attitude – the intention to collaborate is meaningless unless those responsible for delivering the relationship exhibit the right personal attitudes to working collaboratively. Evidence suggests that, while people generally like to work collaboratively, they need specific training, role models and mentoring, both as individuals and within a team environment. The growth of smart city knowledge and the myriad evolving initiatives bear testament to the level of innovation being generated, much of which comes from collaboration between smaller and larger organisations. The Hypercat Alliance provides the opportunity for the growing community it represents to leverage one another’s knowledge, by breaking down the barriers between disciplines to forge a leading smart city approach based on their collective ideas.
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Foreword
INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
Simon Michell Editor
At the vanguard of the Smart City revolution
T
his inaugural edition of Smart Cities – supported by UK Trade & Investment (UKTI), Innovate UK and the Hypercat Alliance – is the first of a planned series of smart city publications by Senate Publishing. As the smart city revolution gathers pace, we will extend our portfolio of publications in partnership with the sector to help support the efforts of the Hypercat Alliance and its Internet of Things (IoT) standard. The importance of standards cannot be questioned. They lay at the very heart of the IoT agenda. As more and more sensors and ‘things’ get connected to the internet, they need to be able to discover each other and then communicate in a meaningful way. This is what the Hypercat standard is helping to achieve. Already, there are multiple examples in which it is in use, including in Bristol, London and Milton Keynes. The Hypercat standard is an exemplary illustration of the proactive approach to the smart city sector being taken by the UK. The country is well placed to offer leadership, skills and inspiration in the smart city revolution, thanks to the breadth and depth of its expertise in this rapidly growing sector. There is no doubt that the UK has nurtured more of the best smart city technologists and digital practitioners than almost any other country. Its world-class universities and scientific institutions are helping to establish the UK as the European centre for smart city technology. And, as the national programme to expand the digital infrastructure across all of the UK continues, the country is rapidly becoming better able to benefit from the cost-saving efficiencies, environmental mitigations, social innovations and commercial opportunities that ultra-fast broadband – the backbone of smart cities – is already delivering. The new digital networks that are being implemented across the UK are empowering the establishment of smart cities across the country – from Glasgow in Scotland; Leeds and Manchester in the Northern Powerhouse; Birmingham and Milton Keynes in the Midlands; to London and Bristol in the south. The exciting transformation of some of our most historic communities is made easier thanks to foresighted initiatives by UKTI, Innovate UK and the Hypercat Alliance. Dynamic centres such as the Future Cities Catapult are helping to accelerate the growth of our digital community and swell the ranks of small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups that are forging ahead, thanks to their agile, flexible and entrepreneurial spirit. The Hypercat Alliance, ably led by one of the new breed of digital pioneers, Flexeye, is a perfect example of the leadership that the UK can offer. Furthermore, the Hypercat IoT standard is fast becoming the bedrock of the national smart city movement and is set to widen its scope internationally, particularly among the UK’s partner nations in the Commonwealth.
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The Hypercat Alliance
Understanding the Hypercat Alliance Simon Michell traces the origins of Hypercat and asks Justin Anderson, chair of the Alliance’s steering committee, how its groundbreaking project will release the potential to create innovative smart city value webs
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SMART CITIES
The Hypercat Alliance
INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
I
t all started back in October 2012, when Innovate UK (then known as the Technology Strategy Board) saw an opportunity to bring together the country’s greatest minds and its most innovative technology companies in an effort to get ahead in industries such as civil engineering, architecture, finance and IT. Innovate UK wanted to make sure that the country was among the world leaders in the fast-moving revolution of connected devices, technology and infrastructure. To add to this momentum, the Internet of Things (IoT) had finally emerged from the shadows, with market forecasters such as Gartner assessing its economic potential in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Digital infrastructure was becoming increasingly affordable and more widespread. Sensors were appearing on city streets, motorways, lampposts, vehicles and buildings, and could now be buried in the ground for a decade or more due to breakthroughs in battery life cycles. Buildings were acquiring digital data-gatherers and distributors. Almost everyone possessed a smart phone. Big data had truly arrived. In other words, the infrastructure or ecosystem that would enable smart cities was already being installed. What is more, the concept of the smart city had begun to take a much firmer hold across the globe, and nations were investing huge amounts of money and intellectual capital in them. India alone has launched a programme to create 100 smart cities.
Solving the silo problem
SHUTTERSTOCK
The task of Innovate UK is to fund research into the major technology problems and opportunities facing the country. It realised that the big issue was one that the military has struggled with for more than two decades: interoperability. Generals on the battlefield know that the key to generating optimum effect from systems and equipment is to enable them to talk to each other. Rather than each system or service operating within its own ecosystem or silo, The infrastructure for the Internet of Things that will underpin the smart city revolution is already being installed
they should be open for all other systems to plug into, thus releasing capability and value that was never part of the original scope. Innovate UK began to invest significantly in solving the silo problem, handing over £6.4 million to launch an IoT Ecosystem Demonstrator project. Over the 12 months from mid 2013, some 40 organisations – ranging from large UK-based multinationals such as ARM, Balfour Beatty, IBM UK and BT, to top UK universities such as Cambridge and Surrey – were arranged alongside start-ups and SMEs (including Hypercat’s lead company, Flexeye) into eight technology clusters. Each cluster was tasked with solving a specific interoperability problem relating to themes such as transport, logistics, open data, education and local services. At the first meeting, representatives came together to see whether it was ever going to be possible for them to work alongside each other. After all, in the words of Hypercat steering committee chair Justin Anderson, “the Internet of Things needs machines to work together better – and to make that happen, people need to work together too”. Fortunately, it became increasingly obvious that there was indeed a solution to the interoperability problem that they would be able to make available to the wider world.
Hypercat is born As each of the clusters started their demonstration projects they identified a need to rethink themselves into horizontal and vertical sectors – the horizontal focusing on generic interoperability solutions and the vertical on real-world situations, such as those relating to airports, car parks and on city streets. This new structure brought a realisation that the biggest breakthrough would be in enabling the various elements in the IoT to ‘discover’ each other and ask what each did and what information they had. This led to a spin-off three-month task in which all 40 organisations worked together on this challenge. To maintain momentum and to keep everyone on point and on schedule, the group hired an independent referee to oversee the process: Pilgrim Beart, CEO of 1248. His company 15
The Hypercat Alliance
SMART CITIES
As director and founder of the Hypercat Alliance, Justin Anderson, executive chairman of Flexeye, is one of the standardbearers for Hypercat
subsequently became the host for the initial version of Hypercat 1.0 and led the first update process that created Hypercat 1.1. After an intense three months, the group came up with a very high-level, thin layer of standardised vocabulary that could be used by those implementing all parts of the IoT – apps, data hubs and sensors. “It is a simple, living, expandable catalogue of terms using Hypermedia,” says Anderson. “This became known as Hypercat (Hypermedia Catalogue).”
The Hypercat Alliance The beauty of having the 40-plus UKbased companies working on the challenge together was that they became the early adopters of the system. Hypercat was soon implemented in systems that the various organisations were using. For example, 1248 has launched its first scalable IoT service – the Geras time-series database – and, naturally, Geras fully supports Hypercat on its interfaces. In order to promote Hypercat further, both nationally and internationally, the organisations that developed the system formed a Alliance in which they are known as the Founder Members. This organisation is open to all organisations worldwide, large and small, with all 16
Key members Hypercat Lead Partner: Flexeye Hypercat Advisory: 1248, Accenture, ARM, Arqiva, Axillium, Broadcom, BT, Cisco Systems, Flexeye, Fujitsu, Huawei, KPMG, LM Technologies, Open Energi, QinetiQ, Symantec
members, according to Anderson, being “encouraged to understand other partners’ capabilities and identify opportunities for collaborative business development”. Aside from the status of Founder Member, there are three other levels at which members can participate: the Advisory, the Steering Committee and as an Associate Partner. From the rather select group that came together in 2013, the Alliance has grown rapidly and continues to expand its membership. It now numbers some 700 members worldwide across the four levels. So how exactly does this create value? “‘The Hypercat standard is simple,” explains Anderson. “It can be used by a lone developer or a multinational corporation. It introduces that missing part of the jigsaw – the interoperability.” If that was not enough, another vital element introduced by Hypercat is the breaking down of entry barriers, allowing small enterprises to compete with major, $100 billion companies. For the customer, it introduces a level playing field with the freedom from being locked into a single vendor’s solution; people can plug in and unplug systems as their needs change. In terms of smart cities, a derivative of the Hypercat Alliance, HypercatCity, is
Hypercat Alliance Founder Members: 1248, AIMES, AlertMe, Amey, ARM, Avanti, Badger Pass, Balfour Beatty, Bre, BT, Carillion, City of Westminster, Critical Software, Ctrl-Shift, Dartt, EDF Energy, Eseye, Flexeye, Guildford Borough, Highways Agency, IBM, Intel, IntelliSense, Lancaster University, Living PlanIt, London City Airport, Merseyside Transport Trust, Milligan, Mission:Explore, Neul, Open Data Institute, Open University, Plāçr, Red Ninja Studios, Science Scope, Smart Homes & Building Association (SH&BA), Stakeholder Design, Traak, University of Birmingham, University of Bristol, University of Cambridge, University College London (UCL), University of Surrey Hypercat Steering Committee: 1248, Amey, Aquamatix, Arkessa, ARM, Asset Mapping, Axillium, BAE Systems, Balfour Beatty, BSI, BT, Carillion, Critical Software, Dartt, Flexeye, Highways Agency, HouseMark, Moixa Technology, National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Red Ninja Studios, RedBite, Rolls-Royce, Umbrellium, University of Surrey, VeriSign
already being used as part of the Bristol is Open smart city test-bed project, as well as the Milton Keynes Future City programme. Also, when Europe’s largest smart city regeneration project – Old Oak and Park Royal – was launched in April 2015, HypercatCity was selected as the method that will ensure visibility, interoperability and cooperation between the smart systems, which will be embedded in the new infrastructure. Hypercat will work with the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation to develop the smart strategy that will address all of the urban challenges in the emergent smart city.
The Hypercat Alliance
INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
Flexeye’s Nick Monnickendam reveals how the Hypercat digital catalogue system helps to connect different entities on the Internet of Things (IoT), allowing them to be used in the development of smart city applications, services and processes
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mart technologies hold out great promise for cities. They can deliver enormous quantities of real-time data that makes it possible to create insight and improve city services. However, in practice, it has often proved challenging to combine data from different types of connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It is hard to find the right data in the first place, then it is difficult to combine this data into new applications or services. Solving these so-called ‘interoperability’ challenges has the potential to unlock trillions
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Hypercat: the concept
Combining data from the vast wealth of sources within a city creates immense possibilities for new apps and services of dollars in value. Indeed, McKinsey has estimated that this interoperability is essential to unlocking 40% of the $11 trillion estimated future value of the IoT. The Hypercat Alliance (‘Hypercat’) was set up, with Innovate UK funding, to create an open standard, also called Hypercat, to make it easier to discover and combine IoT data. This addresses two of 17
The Hypercat Alliance the central challenges of the IoT: firstly, how to find relevant and trustworthy data from connected things; and, secondly, how to make it easier for those things to talk to each other. Hypercat makes it easier for application developers to find and use data to create innovative new apps, fostering innovation and improvements to city services. The standard is also intentionally brief and accessible to all, with the intention of encouraging wide-scale adoption. Traditionally, software apps are built separately, by different people, in different ways. Sometimes they are vertically integrated with other apps, but typically in a structured, pre-planned fashion. In the smart city space, there is great potential to unlock insight and value by combining data in myriad different directions, most of which are not known in advance. This will cut across domains and departments. For example, traffic movement, air quality and health data can be combined into new apps and services for real-time management of traffic flows. In this case, the benefits could include reduced congestion, improved air quality and better health and wellbeing outcomes. Devolution will accelerate such opportunities by bringing sets of urban services together under single, city-wide authorities.
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In Manchester, the CityVerve smart city demonstrator uses Hypercat to embed interoperability across the Internet of Things
Dealing with different data structures However, in practice, integrating data from across a multitude of apps is often difficult and time consuming. To start with, the data may be structured differently in each app, making it hard to find. As a very basic example, data on the location of vehicles could be structured according to latitude and longitude in a traffic-management system, but structured by vehicle type in a fleetThe more data is Hypercatmanagement app. When this is enabled, the more there is to extended across the infrastructure and services for an entire city, there be discovered and the greater are vast number of ways in which the number of apps and data can be arranged. The greater the variety of data you need, and the services that can be created, wider the number of apps and all of which can generate data data stores you need to look at, the bigger the challenge becomes. Hypercat tackles this challenge of data discovery by focus their efforts on combining and analysing data in innovative providing a common cataloguing and referencing system for ways in order to generate insight and improved city services. the automatic discovery of data. This includes metadata to Hypercat need not be limited to the data from smart devices – describe the type of data that is available and unique resource it enables machine discovery of data from any kind of entity, as long identifiers (URIs) to show where it can be found. The result is that as these entities have a digital representation and are referenced in machines can find the data they need, without the requirement a catalogue. For example, entities can be physical things or areas, for IT people to work through large volumes of documentation like a building, floor or room. Hypercat makes it much easier to on how data is structured. discover the things in the room, which of the things are sharing data Having found the data, the next challenge is to access it and and to understand what data they are sharing. A great example of use it in new apps and services. Hypercat also addresses this how this can be brought to life is Thingful, which makes it possible challenge through the use of standard application programming to geolocate publicly available, Hypercat-enabled data from interfaces (APIs). Combined with automated data discovery, this connected devices by diving down into ever more granular maps. means that application developers can save considerable amounts In little more than a year, the Hypercat standard has already of time on writing code to get the data they need. Instead, they can gained real traction. It is being used in several of the UK’s largest 18
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cities, including London, Milton Keynes and Manchester. All of the cities bidding in Innovate UK’s recent IoT City Demonstrator competition included Hypercat. At the same time, major businesses such as BT have been building their own Hypercat catalogues.
Setting a new standard Hypercat has also recently been formalised as a British Standards Institution (BSI) standard, through the creation of PAS 212, which is itself an important step towards a full international standard. Indeed, the Hypercat Alliance has already started to forge collaboration, based on the value of the standard, with the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the Open Connectivity Forum (OCF). International recognition continues to grow, with interest in the standard as far afield as India and Australia.
This is a virtuous circle. The more data is Hypercat-enabled, the more there is available to be discovered and the greater the number of apps and services that can be created, all of which can generate data that can be referenced in catalogues. For instance, the Hypercat Alliance is working closely with the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation to incorporate smart thinking and strategy right from the start of the UK’s largest regeneration project. Using the Hypercat standard across the development could deliver massive benefits right through the planning, construction and maintenance of infrastructure and assets. To find out how you can start to Hypercat enable your data, or use data from existing published catalogues, visit www.hypercat.io 19
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What is the Internet of Things? John Davies, chief IoT researcher at BT, and Pilgrim Beart, CEO of 1248, describe the Internet of Things (IoT) and Hypercat’s role in making it better for everyone and everything
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he term ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) has become almost meaningless through indiscriminate overuse. To reclaim it, let us define the IoT as a network of connected devices embedded in the real world. This world does not relate to consumer items such as smartwatches, but to the industrial sensors and actuators that are increasingly finding their way into just about everything – from buildingmanagement systems and streetlights to construction machinery, heart monitors and energy and water systems. The number of these devices is growing rapidly,
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currently at around 25% per year, and is driven by the falling costs and rising benefits of connecting to the internet.
Why is the IoT different? So far, we have experienced perhaps two major types of connected device: • Human-facing devices, such as PCs and smartphones; and • connected devices embedded within the fabric of our factories, roads, buildings and other infrastructure. The first of these exist within a rich ecosystem of interoperability, with rapid
change driven over the past 20 years by the internet’s open, somewhat freewheeling, philosophy. You can use almost any smartphone with almost any internet service, with the internet acting as the neutral broker inbetween. That is great for all parts of the ecosystem, because it gives suppliers scale – they can make one thing and sell it unchanged to millions of customers. The embedded machines in our factories and cities have often been connected to other things, and to servers and applications, but only within their own vertical silos. A building-management
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system could get away with using proprietary standards because it wasn’t expected to talk to anything else. This is the world of classic M2M (machine-tomachine). The problem with it is that it fragments the market into thousands of small, closed markets, none of which can reach sufficient scale to allow the kind of transformative change that we have seen in the consumer world. Therefore, the important letter in IoT is its first. Using the internet as a lingua franca between devices, services and applications will bring horizontal interoperability to things – and therefore introduce a
Cambrian explosion in the number and diversity of all of these. You can still choose to implement a closed system using these parts (for example, for a buildingmanagement system), but you will be doing so using parts that are much cheaper and much better, due to economies of scale and because competition has driven up quality.
IoT challenges Now, lest we be accused of peddling some unachievable nirvana, let us address the question of why it has not happened yet. There are some very real obstacles that have stood in the way. One is the fact that
The IoT is revolutionising the ways in which people and devices interact standards have often evolved separately in each silo, and so, typically, nothing from one silo works with anything outside it. The move towards internet protocols as a lingua franca will help with this greatly. Another blocker has been the concerns over privacy and security. Increasingly, people want to use devices such as smartphones to view and manage machines, and that is much easier once everything is connected to the internet. 21
The Hypercat Alliance
But opening up any system can expose it to security concerns, such as those posed by hackers. It also introduces bigger questions of privacy. These same challenges were triggered by the ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) phenomenon – the policy whereby employees are allowed to bring personal devices to work, and use those devices to access company information. While the challenges are certainly not trivial, they are addressable. Perhaps the biggest potential blocker of all to the arrival and growth of the IoT is people. The promise of the IoT is a sharp rise in devices, services and applications, all working with each other automatically. But if a human is required to create every piece of interoperability by manually writing software, for example, then the human becomes the blocker, because human time is limited, while the number of machines that may wish to interact is growing exponentially.
Solutions to the IoT challenges To say that the internet is a panacea to these problems is overstating it somewhat, but the ethos of the internet has brought about the incredible transformation of the web over the past 15 years, and could drive the IoT over the next 15 years in the same way. A vital aspect of the internet is its ‘openness’. This term, much used, is sometimes misunderstood to mean free or public or insecure, but the cognoscenti understand it as something along the lines of freedom to interoperate. Open standards allow vendors to assemble complete solutions out of interchangeable parts. This is clearly good for the customer, because it avoids lock-in. It is also good for the vendors as, effectively, they are not locked in to their customers either – they can sell to a whole market. Another familiar computing concept is that of the platform – a common layer that 22
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devices can connect to, and upon which applications and services can be built. As such, an open platform is an agreed collection of open standards that everybody works to. This is very different from a closed, manufacturer-specific platform that will lock you in. The web is a great example of an open platform, it is not controlled by anyone, but acts to everyone’s advantage. We need the same thing for smart cities, and this is the promise of the IoT.
What problem does Hypercat address? If, as mentioned above, humans are required to connect each combination of device, service and app by writing bespoke software on each occasion, then humans become the bottleneck. But, if one wants to use an application with a service that it has never ‘seen’ before, how does that application discover what data or things are within the service? There is no standard way to get going, so someone must manually write code to make it work. Thus Hypercat was born: a specification that gives machines a standard way to get talking with each other, and therefore play a part in unlocking the explosion of functionality and benefits that the IoT promises.
How will this affect smart cities? In the past, connected city services were deployed on a case-by-case basis, each in its own vertically integrated silo. If someone wanted a display of the availability of parking spaces, to manage the energy of streetlights, or to empty bins when full, they would need to create a solution. Each solution stood on its own merits, but because they were vertically closed systems there wasn’t any synergy between them. Therefore, no ecosystem was created and no synergistic benefits were realised. Imagine instead that all three of the above services had been deployed to do
One barrier to growth of the IoT is concern from the public over issues of privacy and security the same job, and at the same cost, but mandated to be compliant with some open platform. Initially, there is no change. But then, the synergy starts to kick in. Each of these services requires a backhaul connection to connect it to the internet. If they are all compatible then they can all use the same one, saving lots of money and complexity. When that backhaul
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“The promise of the IoT is a sharp rise in devices, services and applications, all working with each other automatically�
needs to be upgraded, it only needs to be done once with everyone benefiting. And, because they are now all part of a coherent system, cross-coupling benefits will undoubtedly emerge. As a simple example, imagine a smart lighting system that intelligently and automatically adjusts according to traffic levels, car park occupancy, or the weather. By choosing to mandate compliance with open standards, cities become an open, interoperable ecosystem, to the enormous financial and functional benefit of citizens. 23
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From Hypercat to Hyperspace: the Spearhead projects Simon Michell talks to Nick Monnickendam, director of marketing at Flexeye, about the smart demonstrators that Hypercat launched in spring 2015
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n 25 February 2015, Flexeye and Axillium hosted an exclusive Hypercat reception at Level39’s offices in the heart of London financial centre Canary Wharf. The idea was to launch a set of projects, known as Spearheads, that would act as scaleable, interoperable demonstrators for the Hypercat standard, and illustrate the
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art of the possible in smart city and Internet of Things (IoT) technology solutions. Dr Nick Appleyard, head of digital at Innovate UK, Hypercat’s main investor, welcomed everybody with a quick outline of why the meeting was taking place, before handing over to Professor Simon Anholt, who then gave a 10-minute rundown on what makes a city a good place in which
to live and work. This approach was designed to get everyone thinking more about citizens and their aspirations than the technology and potential solutions that the attendees had brought with them. Anholt also highlighted a key deliverable that the Hypercat standard offered those in the smart city marketplace: the ability for them to collaborate rather than compete.
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Attendees comprised a mixture of Hypercat founding members and those representing the Alliance’s steering committee and advisory board. The list included high-profile industrialists, such as BT’s Alistair Duke and David Golby from BAE Systems, as well as executives from other Hypercat companies working in the chosen Spearhead themes of energy, infrastructure and environment, health and safety and transport. Following a series of presentations, the group gathered at tables for working sessions with the advisory board to scope out everyone’s plans.
Wide range of projects In total, there are 11 vertical Spearheads, each chosen to represent a broad spectrum of the everyday operations within a city. Nick Monnickendam, director of marketing at Hypercat’s lead organisation, Flexeye, says “there is a really good variety across the Spearheads. They are to do with cities, buildings, highways, infrastructure and logistics. These are the sorts of things that city authorities care about, as well as civil engineers, master planners and development consultancies. They are also in areas where a lot of smart-related investment is taking place.”
The 11 vertical Spearheads have one thing in common – both 1248 and Flexeye (founding members with seats on both the advisory board and steering committee) are involved in them. The other companies particpating in each Spearhead are: • Smart parking (BT, DeTe Smart Sensors) • Smart facilities (ARM, Redbite, University of Cambridge) • Smart logistics (BT, Dartt) • Smart highways (ARM, Arqiva, CSIC, Costain, Highways England, Redbite) • Smart fault diagnosis (BAE Systems) • Smart buildings (Asset Mapping) • Smart water (Aquamatix) • Smart energy (Moixa) • Smart lighting (BT, Enlight) • Social Housing (HouseMark, Arqiva, Webthings) • Seracat (previously known as MyGuardian), (University of Surrey)
The Spearhead projects, which demonstrate the possibilities of smart technology solutions, were launched at an exclusive Hypercat reception in Canary Wharf
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When you start to combine the Spearheads they become more powerful, they start to open up many more possibilities.” Monnickendam is quick to point out that the Flexeye platform is not the only way to do this. However, in this instance it acts as a glue that binds the whole Hypercat concept together to demonstrate its value to UK plc.
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Entering Hyperspace
Following the presentations, groups gathered for working sessions to formulate their plans The reasoning behind the Spearheads, which are funded through the £6.4 million Innovate UK grant awarded to Hypercat in 2013, is multifaceted. Firstly, they are designed to kick-start the momentum for creating the Hypercat catalogues that are at the heart of the Hypercat concept. Secondly, they demonstrate how these catalogues can then be used operationally to create applications and services. Thirdly, they show how the catalogues can then be combined across the Spearhead themes to create additional value that was not initially obvious. It is this combination across the Spearhead themes that most excites Monnickendam. Flexeye’s platform is being used to demonstrate how data in Hypercat catalogues, drawn from across the vertical
Spearheads, can be used to rapidly create new applications that deliver increased insight and control; in other words, to illustrate the practical benefits of interoperability, for example, by combining building- and energy-related data. The platform – which is already being used by Flexeye’s partners, such as KPMG – also makes it a lot easier for non-technical people to build apps. This is likely to become more important in the smart city arena, where people are collaborating from across disciplines to improve city services. “It is designed specifically for nontechnical people,” says Monnickendam. “You don’t need to do lots of complicated software coding or have deep IT skills. All you need is to be able to think from a business perspective. The really fun stuff is when you start combining data from the separate catalogues developed by the siloed Spearheads, because you can come up with something completely unexpected.
“There is a mass of traction now behind Hypercat. We have got more than 900 members. We are getting a really strong level of international interest 26
It is one of the key elements of an idea known as Hyperspace. “Hypercat makes it possible to discover data and combine it quickly using automation techniques, not laborious manpower hours,” says Monnickendam. “Hyperspace brings Hypercat to life by connecting Hypercatenabled components into a ‘value web’ that cuts across industries and applications. It is backed by leading civil engineering, consulting and technology players, who are collaborating to make major infrastructure ‘smart from the start’. This helps to increase the value, reduce the costs and minimise the risks of investments in transport, energy and the built environment.” In the run-up to June 2016’s Hypercat summit, all the participants are busy developing their Spearheads and, by then, a lot of implementation work will have been done. The focus is then shifting towards publicising the work that has been done and encouraging others to use the standard and reap the rewards. The dissemination phase has already begun and is key to spreading the gospel of Hypercat and Hyperspace. The more people who know about the Hypercat standard, the more people will start to incorporate it into their own plans, strategies, products and services. There is no doubt, however, that Hypercat’s reputation is growing rapidly thanks to the efforts of the Spearhead projects. “There is a mass of traction now behind Hypercat,” says Monnickendam. “We have got more than 900 members. We are getting a really strong level of international interest. Hypercat is going into India. Other countries are interested. Cities have already adopted it. What we need to start doing is working out how to keep on expanding it in a sustainable way into the future.”
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Working with Hypercat Simon Michell talks to Sophie Peachey, head of insight and innovation at Axillium Research, to find out how the Hypercat specification is helping companies transform their day-to-day business operations
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xillium Research has been part of the Hypercat journey since before the name was invented. The company specialises in the management of collaborative innovation, focusing on complex, largescale clusters that tackle industry-wide challenges – often called Grand Challenges.
Since it was established in 2007, Axillium has raised more than ÂŁ180 million of research funding. Crucially, this investment has enabled the creation or safeguarding of more than 5,000 jobs in the UK alone. At the beginning of the journey, Axillium Research joined forces with Guildfordbased IT company Flexeye and the
Rapid growth in road and rail passenger journeys threatens to hold back the UK economy unless new strategies are developed
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The Hypercat Alliance University of Surrey to establish Eyehub, a precursor of the Hypercat Alliance. Eyehub was one of eight consortia established in 2013 by the Technology Strategy Board (TSB – now Innovate UK) as Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem demonstrators. Sophie Peachey, head of insight and innovation at Axillium, wrote the original funding bid and established the consortium that turned Eyehub into Hypercat – in essence, she can be considered one of its godparents. Peachey points out, however, that the godfather of Hypercat is a former TSB digital scientist, Maurizio Pilu. “It was Maurizio’s vision to force the eight consortia to work together on a piece of interoperability capability that created the Hypercat specification,” says Peachey. Back then, Hypercat was the slimmest piece of interoperability technology on which every consortium could agree. All eight consortia proved its capability by ensuring that their own IoT hubs could discover and use data from the hub of another consortium, make their own data discoverable for use by another, or both.
Moving to the next stage The ecosystem demonstrators were funded for one year, from April 2013 to the end of March 2014. Realising that Hypercat was potentially a game-changing technology, Axillium began phase two of the process. “We then went on to pull together four of the consortia into one to compete for phase-two funding, which we won. Hence, the resultant Hypercat Alliance is again led by Flexeye, with governance and management provided by Axillium. This is building new layers of best-practice IoT technology into Hypercat and proving these against vertical themes that apply the technology to real use cases across industry and smart cities,” says Peachey. The Hypercat specification is now being trialled or incorporated into trials of smart city programmes across the country, from Bristol to London and Milton Keynes. Not surprisingly, these trials, which are cityled, include the installation of sensors and smart meters to improve efficiencies in energy usage, transport systems and water 28
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and waste. These are natural themes for a local authority to focus on as they will generate not just cost savings, but also improvements in the delivery of these services that will enhance the lives of citizens in the future.
The transport challenge Having played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Hypercat Alliance, Axillium is now working on a cluster that it hopes will transform the transport industry in the UK. As the country continues to expand economically, and as the population continues to grow rapidly, transport issues run the risk of holding back the tide of progress. According to a White Paper written by Axillium in response to the challenges facing integrated transport systems in the UK, Highways England predicts a 40% growth in road traffic in the 30 years between 2010 and 2040. Moreover, Network Rail’s 2013 Strategy forecasts that, by 2020, another 400 million passenger journeys will be made every year. The stark reality is that the UK will not be able to build its way out of gridlock. Not only would that be politically difficult and economically challenging, but the old mantra of building your way out of trouble no longer seems credible. Axillium believes that technology holds the answer, specifically in five key areas: • connecting the hardware of the physical with the software of telecom systems; • maturing vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-device and vehicleinfrastructure networks; • continually improving the safety and security of managed personal data; • ensuring public- and enterprise-level acceptance of social and legal frameworks; and • future-proofing technology in line with legislation for connected transport systems. To progress these five key themes, Peachey is now gathering together interested parties to establish the Midlands Integrated Transport Cluster. “The idea has been endorsed at the highest level and has
a good level of interest from academia and industry alike,” she says. It is based around the Midlands because of the depth of automotive excellence that resides there. It is, for example, the home of the Motor Industry Research Association, Horiba Mira and the Millbrook Proving Grounds. Several world-famous automotive names are also synonymous with the region. To get things off the ground, Axillium is targeting two funding sources: the UK Government and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 fund. According to Peachey, “there may be an opportunity to apply for
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some UK funding that the cluster could use to do a small project, just to get started and establish itself as an entity. Then we could start the process of winning EU funding”.
Expanding the cluster This iterative funding approach is a regular modus operandi for the company. “The way we develop clusters is that every three months there will be a review to identify additional funding opportunities to expand the cluster,” says Peachey. Naturally, Hypercat will be an integral element of the cluster right from the
beginning as the members go through the definition phase of framing out the programme themes and the individual projects within those themes. “Clearly the technology that has been developed to connect together IoT is a key enabler to that. It is a horizontal capability that underpins all the components that need to be built on top,” Peachey concludes. “It shouldn’t matter what sort of ‘Thing’ we are looking at; a capability like Hypercat can create that interoperability and the discovery of datasets or information from sensors. That is going to be critical.”
The Midlands Integrated Transport Cluster will be located amid centres of automotive excellence, including the Millbrook Proving Grounds
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Delivering smart cities
Delivering happiness Professor Simon Anholt tells Simon Michell why smart cities need to make a positive contribution to mankind as a whole, not just to their own citizens
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o paraphrase policy guru Professor Simon Anholt, if a chicken caught a cold and died in a small village in Asia 20 or 30 years ago, it was a tragedy for the chicken and her owner, but you didn’t expect it to result in a global pandemic. Likewise, if a bank manager in the United States lent money in the knowledge that the borrower had no real prospects of ever paying it back, that was just a bad business decision that would damage the bank’s reputation. You didn’t expect this to sow the seeds of an international financial meltdown. Globalisation however, has changed the dynamic – similarly to the butterfly in Edward Lorenz’s famous chaos theory, in which a single flap of its wings in Brazil, given the right circumstances, can cause a hurricane in Texas. In other words, small things on one side of the world can turn into huge problems on the other side. Unfortunately for us, this theory has now become a reality. SARS and the 2008 financial crisis are prime examples of the growing trend – one that could threaten humanity in an existential manner if we don’t do something about it. As globalisation takes hold, Anholt thinks that we are not responding quickly enough and have not understood the inevitable consequences. He points out that “globalisation has taken us by surprise, and we have been slow to respond”, meaning crises that were once local and containable are fast becoming global and uncontrollable. Much of this is directly attributable to the tidal wave of humans moving from the open plains of rural poverty to the cramped slums of urban deprivation. Cities are becoming critical.
Professor Anholt should know; he has been working as a policy advisor for 20 years, giving advice to heads of state and CEOs around the world on a range of diplomatic, commercial and national identity issues that are affected by these global challenges. His work has led to him being awarded the Nobels Colloquia Prize for “his pioneering work in understanding and managing the identity and image of nations, cities and regions; and the impact of reputation on their prosperity and competitiveness”.
New ways of measuring success
Anholt believes that we have got to change. “We have to move away from the 1980s vision of a mega-city where millions upon millions of people come together in an unplanned and haphazard way to make a place uninhabitable,” he says. “We have to develop in a smart way. Above all, we need to seek a different path – a path based on being and doing good rather than craving wealth and power, on being good ancestors rather than being effective competitors.” This idea is compatible with one he encountered while advising the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. His Majesty, the Fourth King Jigme Singye Wangchuck expounded the idea of Gross National Happiness (GNH) in his book of the same name. This is the concept that insists a good way of measuring success is not on the basis of how competitive a place might be or how much money people make there, but ultimately how happy they are. The core of the idea is based on making sure everyone has not only a good standard of living, but also the robust psychological well-being that results from good governance, an efficient health “We have to develop in a smart way. Above all, we and welfare system, high levels of education, need to seek a different path – a path based on a lively community spirit, cultural and ecological diversity and resilience, and a being and doing good rather than craving wealth and satisfactory work-life balance. power, on being good ancestors rather than Anholt’s idea of the ‘Good Country’ takes this one stage further, arguing that individual being effective competitors.” happiness is certainly a more meaningful goal than individual wealth, but collective wellbeing must be our ultimate aim. During his research, he has noticed that those cities and Globalisation has led to shifting dynamics, where actions taken countries that do more good in the world often in one country or city can have far-reaching effects across the globe enjoy more success. “The research clearly 31
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Professor Anholt collects the Nobels Colloquia Prize for his pioneering work, in which he advises people in positions of power on key national issues affected by global challenges
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Crises that were once containable are fast becoming global as increasing numbers of people move to urban expanses
showed that the places that were really successful were the ones that had good reputations, and those reputations were more often earned through good global citizenship, rather than through the achievement of wealth, power or success,” he says. Just as the Bhutanese have an index to measure the happiness of the kingdom, so Anholt has created the Good Country Index to measure a country’s overall impacts, both positive and negative, on the wider world beyond its borders to determine how ‘good’ it is – effectively a balance sheet for the whole of humanity. It is fascinating to compare the Good Country Index against Anholt’s other annual studies: the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index and City Brands Index. These two metrics enable the user to assess the reputation of a nation or city by finding out what people around the world think of it. You can, for example, find out what Polish people think of London’s job market or cultural life, or what Egyptians think of Spain’s foreign policy or tourist destinations. 32
These surveys measure in detail what people around the world actually believe about these cities and countries, rather than what their governments or populations would like them to believe. This is critical knowledge for the governments that subscribe to the research, because people’s purchasing decisions, tourism choices, investment behaviour and migration patterns are strongly influenced by their perceptions of those countries and cities. With a powerful and positive reputation, getting more trade and talent and tourism is relatively easy and cheap; with a weak or negative reputation, it is almost impossible.
Aligned goals Anholt has shown through analysis of this database of more than 200 billion data points collected over 10 years that the way to obtain a good reputation is to generally focus on the same things as Bhutan’s GNH Index, with the proviso that the benefits must be felt internationally as well as domestically. Coincidently, these benefits overlap the goals and aims of the smart city. Primarily, the city must be outward looking rather than insular, and it must care about its impact both on those who live in it and those who do not. It must be responsible in the way that it uses resources and must offer opportunities to all, from wherever they come. Anholt is convinced that, in the future, people in a position of power, whether in a corporation or in a public-sector body, have to accept that they now have a dual mandate. Nowadays, those in charge must be as concerned for those they do not represent as for those they do. “The new dual mandate makes you responsible for your own people and, to some extent, for every man, woman, child and animal on the planet. You are responsible for your slice of territory and, to some degree, for every square inch of the earth’s surface and the atmosphere above it,” he says. Indeed, for cities to flourish they must enable all citizens to flourish, even if they happen to live in different cities. After all, it is the citizens that will do the good things to establish the virtuous reputation that will make everybody happy.
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Seeing the light
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UrbanDNA’s Graham Colclough argues that the European Union’s Humble Lamppost initiative could provide the key to the future development of smart cities
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ne of the cleverest things about smart cities is their ability to interconnect infrastructures so that they can serve multiple purposes. In most cities, lampposts offer just that opportunity. Alongside more reliable and adaptable lighting, cities can benefit from a wealth of lamppost-based possibilities, such as creating a mesh wifi network, helping drivers find a parking space and supporting environmental monitoring of air quality, waste and flooding, for example. Lampposts can also provide space for electronic street signage and advertising, and can become a home to sensors that can help
Upgrading and replacing existing street lights enables connection with open data streams and services direct visually impaired people. They can function as electric vehicle charge points or even become pedestrian-flow monitors that help keep the high street a vibrant place. Indeed, a city’s lamppost estate should be considered more as a regularly spaced network of elevated posts with power that can help transform the efficiency and effectiveness of a range of services, rather than just being sticks on which to hang lightbulbs. 33
Delivering smart cities So, if the opportunity presented by lampposts is so significant, why isn’t progress being made at scale and pace? A new initiative seeks to ensure it does – the European Union (EU) Humble Lamppost initiative. Its ambition is bold: to deliver 10 million smart lampposts across European cities. That might sound a large number, but if we fail to address this relatively easy-todeal-with and substantial energy consumer in good time, what hope do we have of meeting the European 20:20:20 goals – a 20% increase in energy efficiency, a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions, and 20% increase in the share of renewables in the continent’s energy mix by 2020? Underpinning this ambition is the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC). Launched by the European Commission (EC) in 2012, this vehicle brings together industry, cities and research bodies to move from the previous paradigm of EC-funded projects that run dry when the funding does, to a more sustainable model with greater crosssector commitment and, therefore, greater chance of success and sustenance. Some 4,000 organisations from 31 countries have made a total of 370 commitments that address the nexus of energy, mobility and city infrastructures. The Humble Lamppost commitment is among the most prominent of these, and perhaps the most promising strategic quick win for the EIP.
Need for an integrated approach
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the life stage of the product. However, the reality at the present time is clear: each city that seeks to replace or upgrade its lighting has to tackle the task in isolation. That requires building and using scarce expertise, lengthy design and procurement cycles, and managing city-specific projects. Currently, the way we do this may not be optimal and may simply be a continuation of the way in which things have always been done. If we are to install electric-vehicle charging points on lampposts, clamps for sensors and new instrumentation for lighting systems, there is most certainly a need to agree some basic configuration standards. Tools that help to inform choice, put together business cases and support decision-making will also be welcomed. The Scottish Futures Trust has made available a detailed business-case tool to ease the pain of evaluating financial investment decisions. As part of their commitment to the EIP, the Smart Cities Council has also developed a free-to-use decision-support tool. Given that the smart solution is not as straightforward as those made in the past, common architectures can help the demand side come together around more common solutions – demand aggregation – and help the supply side to figure out where its solutions fit in the overall design and how best to collaborate with other providers. On a positive note, this kind of collaboration is already apparent between automotive manufacturers that support electric vehicles, technology providers and lamp and pole manufacturers. Are they, however, fully conversant with demand-side requirements, or is there more that cities can do to provide support?
An integrated smart approach that uses the lamppost for purposes beyond lighting requires the involvement of various disciplines, which can lead to greater complexity. Indeed, worrisome indications in the market suggest that decision-makers are focusing solely Collaboration to achieve success on lighting, as they are concerned that exploring smart opportunities Smart lampposts can play a strategic and highly visible role in will divert attention from upgrading the luminaires. This might delivering smart cities. It is time for the lighting industry and the be considered a short-sighted view, as the cost of employing humble lamppost to step up and play their part. It will take collective contractors a second time to install smart devices could prohibit bravery and open, collaborative working between and within the further action. public and private sectors to make it happen. There are a few notable city-wide contracts involving several Although the EIP’s Humble Lamppost commitment is important, hundred thousand lamp replacements that may be at risk of action cannot simply be seen to be ‘out there in Europe’. Momentum this. Although the business case for lighting upgrade can have must be generated within countries and regions, as well as among a compellingly short payback and a solid return on investment, groups of cities and industries. constrained public budgets often lead to lighting engineers looking to drip-feed Constrained public budgets often lead to the replacement of energy-saving lamps, lighting engineers looking to drip-feed the replacement neglecting the less-proven promises of associated smart services. of energy-saving lamps, neglecting the less-proven Scale and speed requires money – promises of associated smart services and the confidence of funders. Many banks regard cities as ‘small and risky’. So, alongside technical solutions, cities need to act together to Perhaps the most pressing message on the subject comes generate the scale to attract funders, devise technical solutions from Dutch senator Annemarie Jorritsma, ex-EIP champion,and that foster lenders’ confidence, and think through ownership former mayor of Almere, the Netherlands’ newest city: “If we can’t and business models that enable best value. implement something as simple as the Humble Lamppost along The diversity of lamppost types that are available is, arguably, the lines of the EIP ambitions, then what will happen when we tackle not helping cities to achieve best value. The balance between something difficult?” It is time for the humble lamppost to lose its diversity and standardisation is always tricky and changes with humility, and for those associated with it to act. 34
Delivering smart cities
Source: UrbanDNA
INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
PV (photovoltaic) power for lamp, mobile phone etc
App-based wireless control Wi-Fi, mobile, and mesh Façade lighting (colours)
Smart Lighting • LED
RGBA notification lights
TRAFFIC CONGESTION EXPECT DELAYS
• Photocell control • 0-100% dimming • On-demand lighting
1ST AVENUE Digital street sign
Digital signage • Way-finding • Traffic direction • Civic information • Revenue potential
Environmental sensing (air quality, noise)
eVehicle/ eBike charging
Image sensing • Proximity • Pedestrian counter • Monitoring parking • Public security
Concealed Speakers (music, alerts) Water level/ flood monitoring Push-to-talk system (‘blue-light’ services)
The lamppost not only serves as a power source, but can also be used as a home for smart sensors and devices
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Taking a lead in happiness Scott Cain, chief business officer at the Future Cities Catapult, highlights the importance of leadership in the development of a smart city where happiness is an end in itself
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y job as chief business officer at the Future Cities Catapult is mostly about accelerating innovation to make cities better and help them become more inclusive, resilient, sustainable and safe for all the people who live, work and visit them. At this time, it appears that the focus of most things is on happiness – that most enduring quest. The inspiration? Not the feature film Hector and the Search for Happiness. Instead, it was a sheikh, as I shall explain.
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I have been leading our work in the Gulf, which includes the United Arab Emirates and the fast-developing city-state of Dubai. A little over a year ago, we were engaged by the Executive Office of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum to provide a strategic forward review to underpin his vision for Dubai to become the smartest and happiest city in the world, enabled by innovation and technology. We helped to develop a set of recommendations – informed by our interdisciplinary team of ethnographers, service designers,
Delivering smart cities
INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
Dubai has an ambition to become the world’s smartest and happiest city
of state for happiness has recently been appointed. One of many female senior figures in the UAE, Ohood Al Roumi balances multiple roles and responsibilities, all galvanised by an incredible civic pride and thirst for innovation. It was while working with another part of the Dubai leadership – the Roads and Transport Authority – that we initially brought some of the UK’s world-leading expertise in the emerging science of happiness together. And yes, our science and research base really is recognised as a world leader in the field. This includes behavioural economist Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, co-author of the United Nations World Happiness Report. Together, we are now developing a really inspiring set of activities, working with a host of other urban innovators and entrepreneurs, along with neuroscientists and urban designers. While initially inspired by Dubai, this idea has grown bigger, with interest and engagement from leading developers, city authorities, funders and banks, from the UK, Europe and globally.
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A device for happiness
prototypers, data-scientists and urbanists, as well as entrepreneurship and policy experts – working alongside the strong Emirates team. At a pace we can only admire, many of these proposals have now been acted upon – from a new government department and new data laws to early working versions of decision-making tools, including visualisations, models and citizen dashboards. At their heart sits this question of happiness. Some may be sceptical, but something powerful is happening. A new minister
As Charles Montgomery, one of our collaboration partners and the author of the brilliant Happy City, has argued, it is time we rethink what the city is for. Montgomery insists that the city is in fact a device for happiness. To put this into context, ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle insisted that happiness is human flourishing. He argued that you couldn’t be considered a whole person unless you were also involved in realising some form of public good – something beyond personal gain. There is a lot of potential to interpret this concept of happiness, both individually and as societies, to our times and urban contexts. Of course, at the most fundamental level we all need shelter, security and food, and we have historically moved to cities in search of these essentials. Yet, arguably, the next tier of requirements is akin to what Aristotle meant by happiness, based on achieving a sense of fulfilment. As we welcome a new London mayor in Sadiq Khan, with his new ‘Tech Manifesto’, there is plenty for him to admire in his contemporaries and their blend of urban design, technology and civic engagement. Most famously, perhaps, is the Bogota’s ‘Mayor of Happiness’ himself, Enrique Penalosa, who has done so much to give other city leaders confidence by closing streets to cars, investing in active travel and opening up public spaces for people to be with each other and nature. Closer to home, there is the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, with her participatory budgeting programme – a strong start at 5% of her total budget. 37
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KAMRAN JEBREILI/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES
Delivering smart cities
In recent years, Colombia’s capital city, Bogota, has risen in the happiness rankings
Ohood Al Roumi was recently named the United Arab Emirates’ first-ever minister of state for happiness Even closer to home, Spacehive is just one of the early-stage, high-growth potential businesses that the Future Cities Catapult is beginning to work with to spread a little happiness. Others include: • Open Play – connecting people to places for sport and activities • The Good Gym – combining running with visiting an elderly person to reduce loneliness and social isolation • Mappiness – discovering where, when and why people say they are happy, as well as what they are doing • Playable City – creating shared experiences through play in unlikely urban contexts These innovations highlight the linkages to other important agendas in our cities, including being active for both physical and mental well-being (as well as reducing long-term health costs), increasing the quality and frequency of social interactions (building openness, empathy and trust) and through enhancing exposure to nature in our cities – aspects that the emerging science of happiness suggests are really important. 38
Critically, all of these agendas can be supported and accelerated by enabling technologies, not least urban IoT (Internet of Things), for which, of course, Hypercat is doing its important interoperability work. This then can’t be abstract. These innovations need to be grounded to address human needs, informed by what we call a user research-led approach to innovation. Hence, our Catapult projects to help blind people navigate cities using emerging smart technologies, or other initiatives to help cyclists and runners navigate cities quickly, safely and in ways that will enhance their health, both in the short and long terms.
We are now developing a really inspiring set of activities, working with other urban innovators and entrepreneurs, along with neuroscientists and urban designers Happiness is smart policy and a rich seam for innovation. Research shows us three things: that it raises government approval ratings, that well-being translates into significant cost efficiencies and, most of all, there is a wealth of evidence to show that happiness and well-being are what we all ultimately care about.
Delivering smart cities
INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
Simon Michell explains why common standards are crucial for the UK smart city revolution and how they could save the government billions of pounds every year
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he UK Government has been extraordinarily proactive in promoting the smart city revolution. There are at least two key drivers for this. Firstly, the vast amounts of money that companies may be able to earn in the export market fits in well with the current Exporting is GREAT campaign being run by government department UK Trade & Investment (UKTI). Secondly, there is massive potential for cost-efficiency savings that local governments could achieve, if they are able to adopt a smart city approach. With this in mind, the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) commissioned the British Standards Institution (BSI) to develop a smart cities standards strategy back in 2012. BSI’s remit was to identify where standards are needed; accelerate the roll-out of smart cities and support UK providers of smart city solutions. The result is a collection of Publicly Available Specifications (PAS) and
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Maintaining standards Synthesising waste management processes across the UK could save the country as much as £136 million each year Public Documents (PD) that explain what a smart city is, how to create one and why common standards are key. It also provides a standard vocabulary developed specifically for smart cities.
Smart city terminology The initial document to be published was PAS 180 Smart Cities – Vocabulary, the first of its kind not only in the UK, but also worldwide, as no other country had yet embarked on the same process. This simple dictionary of smart city words and phrases, launched in February 2014, is aimed at policy developers and stakeholders who are, according to the PAS, “interested in leading and shaping the city environment”. Arranged into two main sections – 39
Delivering smart cities
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‘Enabling concepts’ and ‘Applications (output channels) – the publication comprises a logical progression of subsections covering themes such as public and private service-delivery models, resource-management processes and mobility. Essentially, the PAS offers definitions for smart city jargon that most people will probably have heard without necessarily understanding its meaning. The introduction to PAS 180 explains that the document should be used in conjunction with other documents published by BSI: • PAS 181 Smart City Framework – Guide to establishing strategies for smart cities and communities; • PAS 182 Smart City Concept Model – Guide for establishing a model for data interoperability; • PD 8100 Smart City Overview – How to effectively communicate the value of smart cities; and • PD 8101 Smart Cities – Guide to planning and development. Taken together, these documents provide a local authority or private enterprise with the essentials for launching a smart city programme. Moreover, if the standards and guidelines are adopted, whatever is developed has a very good chance of being interoperable with other projects launched under the same parameters.
Smart city standards and Hypercat Unsurprisingly, there is an almost unavoidable crossover between the organisations that were involved in the development of the BSI publications and the members of the Hypercat Alliance. Hypercat founder members the Building Research Establishment, Red Ninja Studios and the University of Cambridge all helped to define the PAS 180 standard. Furthermore, Balfour Beatty was part of both groups that worked on PD 8100 and PD 8101 and also sits on Hypercat’s steering committee. The level of collaboration is impressive, with numerous organisations contributing to a range of different, but complementary, aspects of the burgeoning sector – a sector that is growing rapidly and uniformly across all of the individual technology areas involved. In this case, standardisation is being promoted and established in advance of, or at least concurrently with, technology and process implementation. The Hypercat specification itself is, according to BSI, being turned into the PAS 212 – automatic resource discovery for the Internet of Things – specification that is expected to be published in time for June 2016’s Hypercat summit. So how can these digital standards help in real-life situations? This question is already being answered by the Local Digital Campaign (LDC), which has been tasked by the Department for 40
New systems connected to refuse collection vehicles can help to track service-failure issues Communities and Local Government to find out how using open and common digital standards can help reduce costs incurred by local authorities by focusing on a single service delivery. Waste-management staff were chosen for the experiment. LDC found that answering queries when refuse bins have not been emptied can cost 20 times more by phone than via a website. The problem is that more than one department and/or organisation is involved: the customer-care team, the waste-management team and the refuse collectors. Only the latter knows why a particular bin wasn’t collected, so the waste-management team has to enquire as to why. The refuse collectors have an in-cab system to log such events, and this is how the waste-management team resolves the issue.
Significant cost savings If you could synthesise this process by digitising all the relevant data and making it available to everybody on the web, LDC estimates that you could save the average council as much as £400,000 per year. Across the whole country, that adds up to £136 million annually. Paradoxically, the same-coloured bins are used for different waste types from council to council. One of the fundamental standards would be, therefore, to select a set of descriptors to determine what each colour of bin is for. Local councils would not have to change their refuse collection process, but handle the digital data in a common way. Standardising the way in which this digital intelligence is recorded would unlock much of the process on a national scale. Moreover, standardising other terms and functions would also simplify the contracting process, whereby each authority negotiates a deal with a wastecollection firm. Savings in the order of £15 million on a national level could be achieved for the contracting element of this one service alone, if a common data standard was adopted. Next comes the complex challenge of performance reporting. Without common standards this incurs considerable cost because data cannot be collected in an automated way. With standards, and an Application Programming Interface that helps systems talk to each other, a process could be established to generate performance reports at the local level and across the entire country. This may even help national government to improve decision-making. Waste management is just one example how efficiencies could be achieved with smart technology. Multiplied by the hundreds of services delivered by local authorities, the future cost savings could be in the billions, rather than millions, of pounds.
Industry perspective
INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
How smart technologies are transforming your waste services Charbel Aoun, Chief of Sales and Strategy Smart Waste, Enevo, explains how waste disposal can benefit from a smart solution based on data
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ypically, cities are going about waste disposal in the same way they have been for more than 20 years. Any changes to that process have been relatively minor. The trouble is, nowadays, the amount of waste that cities are generating is growing even faster than the rise in population that most urban areas are experiencing. At same time as this, cities are going through a prolonged period of austerity. We cannot manage waste in the same way any longer. It is unsustainable. At the moment, most of the time we are basically collecting air – empty bins. The bin collectors are doing their best to plan the most efficient routes, but they are missing a vital bit of information – do the bins on their route actually need to be emptied? What tends to happen is the dustbin men have pre-set collection routes that they stick to. Over time, these routes become longer and more complex – in other words less cost-effective. However, in the UK, local authorities where Enevo’s system is being trialled have seen a reduction of collection activities. This has been measured at a reduction of 40% at the lower end of the scale, and at an incredible 97% at the highest. What we do is place one of our wireless fill-level devices in every bin in the selected area in order to start gathering information. This data is then uploaded to the cloud. The sensors are, in effect, mini sonar devices. Just as a sonar on a boat can tell you how close you are sailing to the bottom of the sea, these sensors
Using ultrasonic waves, small sensors can tell whether a bin needs emptying or not
can tell how high the waste is in each bin by sending out ultrasonic waves. This enables the waste disposal managers to analyse the data and find out which bins are full. It can also predict when bins will become full. This information is used to create the most efficient routes and schedules. These are then linked to a tablet device that each driver takes with them on their collection. So now, instead of following the old static routes, the bins are collected according to the most costeffective dynamic routes. The drivers can also add their own observations onto the device, such as local knowledge about tricky roads and unexpected hazards. The predictive, data-based decisionmaking Enevo One system is helping places such as Greenwich, Edinburgh, the Isle of Wight and Islington to optimise their waste collection and disposal services
and achieve greater value out of them. In essence, these local authorities are freeing up resources that can be redirected to other service-delivery tasks that they have to fulfil. Cities such as Amsterdam, Antwerp and The Hague, for example, which have been using the Enevo system for longer, are moving onto the next phase by scaling up the service to cover a greater area and are thereby freeing up even more resources.
Charbel Aoun, Chief of Sales and Strategy Smart Waste at
Delivering smart cities
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Collaboration is key Barry Sheerman MP, a main board member of the Institute for Collaborative Working, explores how focusing less on competition and more on collaboration will help smart city evolution
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mart cities are a huge global point of interest, with many varied aspects to consider and so much knowledge being built up across the world. To fully exploit this global opportunity, organisations must find a way to share their knowledge and expertise for the greater good: they need to collaborate. There will doubtless come a time when smart city concepts mature to the point where the major providers revert to traditional competitive postures. However, the current phase of development suggests that a collaborative approach is likely to be the most effective way for smart city thinking to benefit all those involved. An open, knowledge-sharing engagement in what is a relatively young market is the best way to develop the relevant offerings at this design stage in concept development. There are seven key reasons why smart cities should be focusing less on competition and more on collaboration: 1 No one person has all the answers My experience in the education, social enterprise, manufacturing and sustainability sectors has taught me that, in the majority of cases, the more open sharing that takes place, the more likely it is that answers will evolve. 2 To encourage new entrants Any relatively new market encourages new entrants, who bring new ideas. The key players need to learn from each other in order to understand how best to approach the many issues involved. This feeds the innovative process. 3 To stimulate growth Growth in this relatively new market is likely to be strong, representing a significant wealth-creation opportunity in which momentum will be enhanced by an open, sharing approach, or constrained by a closed, competitive approach.
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4 Sharing stimulates learning The smart cities sector involves a wide variety of issues, knowledge and skills at the leading edge of a number of traditional markets – energy, telecommunications, transport, waste and so on. While each of these is highly competitive in their own right, they can learn from each other within the broader smart city envelope. There is a big skills mismatch between the abilities that young people possess on leaving education and what industry requires – a collaborative approach is key to resolving this mismatch. 5 Improve resource availability The resources needed to develop smart city concepts are likely to be at a premium, resulting in a global shortage of knowledgeable resource. This is best addressed through a sharing approach to help deliver optimum outcomes. 6 Develop new markets Smart city developments will identify emerging new niche markets that stand to benefit those involved and bring in new entrants with more new ideas – a virtuous circle. This is most likely to evolve through an open, trusted community, and is unlikely within a closed competitive environment. 7 Become global and local The smart cities market is a global one, governed by international expectations rather than national requirements. Cutting-edge ideas are likely to emerge from the most unexpected places, and nurturing these ideas will help to develop them and scale them up for global application, as well as for local implementation. We all want to see this tremendously exciting new concept of smart cities succeed and, as with so much else in life, we can achieve more when we work together than when we are separate.
Delivering smart cities
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INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
Institute for Collaborative Working
The Institute for Collaborative Working (ICW), formerly Partnership Sourcing Limited, was established in 1990 as a joint initiative between the Department of Trade and Industry – now the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills – and the Confederation of British Industry. It is a self-financing, not-for-profit organisation whose continuing role is to help organisations large and small, in both the public and private sectors, to build and develop effective competitive business relationships based upon a collaborative approach. The Institute is the thought-leader and driving force behind the BS 11000 Collaborative Business Relationship Framework, the world’s first standard in relationship management, published by the British Standards Institution (BSI) and based on the CRAFT (Collaborative Relationship, Assessment, Fulfilment and Transformation) methodology developed from the collective experience of the institute’s executive network. A draft of BS 11000 was released on the BSI website on 7 January 2016. In recent years, the institute has started to focus on the smart city sector and has held
a number of smart city events to promote collaborative working within the industry. The most recent event, Collaborative Working in Smart Cities, featured presentations covering experience gained in London, in continental Europe and further afield. The one-day event, at Imperial College London, addressed the major smart city considerations of smart buildings, smart energy and smart mobility, together with emerging smart city design protocols. Presentations were given by Professor David Gann of the Smart London Board, Andrew Collinge of the Greater London Authority, Scott Cain from the Future Cities Catapult and Justin Anderson from the Hypercat Alliance, all of whom have also contributed to this publication.
Barry Sheerman, MP for Huddersfield, is a champion of collaborative working and an ICW board member
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Funding matters: following the money Smart city investment is already under way, with large-scale government-funded projects in Europe and the UK bringing about green transformation, reports Simon Michell
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he smart city revolution was born in the recent age of austerity, and a consequential lack of funds brought on by the 2007 financial crash is frequently cited as the most difficult hurdle to clear when embarking on a smart city project. However, the climate-change agenda has thrown out a lifeline because, essentially, a smart city holds many of the same attributes as a sustainable city. Sustainability is increasingly being promoted at the highest levels – by the United Nations, European Commission (EC) and even the White House – as the way to tackle the increase in greenhouse gases. In short, more efficient, less resource-hungry urban communities are key to keeping the temperature down and the flood waters at bay. Although developers of smart city solutions may not have found it easy to persuade commercial banks and private finance houses to release funds over the past decade, governments have been much more amenable. Many countries have signed up to stringent environmental targets, and smart cities are seen as one of the most promising ways of reaching them.
DREAMSTIME
On the horizon Europe’s €80 billion ($91 billion) Horizon 2020 (H2020) sevenyear research funding programme is testament to this. It is the European Union’s (EU) principal R&D budget, which is shared out among member states and some non-members, such as Iceland and Norway. The fund’s Societal Challenges pillar includes two key smart city themes: smart, green and integrated transport and secure, clean and efficient energy. Already, €12 billion ($13.7 billion) has been allocated to these two themes alone. Alongside H2020, the EU has launched the Digital Strategy 2020, which seeks to develop a digital single market in order to generate smart, sustainable and inclusive growth throughout Europe. Through its Societal Challenges pillar, the European Union is funding secure, clean and efficient energy in smart cities
In conjunction with this, the EC has established the European Innovation Partnership-Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC) to speed up the deployment of smart city solutions. An additional EU initiative – the €30 billion ($34 billion) Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) – adds considerable weight to this scheme. Managed by the Innovation and Networks Executive Agency (INEA), the CEF offers grants and other funding opportunities to projects that support trans-European networks in transport, telecommunications and energy. In addition to grants, the CEF offers financial support to projects through “innovative financial instruments such as guarantees and project bonds”. These instruments create significant leverage in their use of the EU budget and act as a catalyst to attract further funding from the private sector and other public-sector actors. Due to its links with the smart city agenda, INEA is managing the funding calls for the EIP-SCC. Each year, Horizon 2020 and the CEF put out a series of calls for proposals through which organisations (mostly broad-based consortia) pitch for funding. Subsequently, this money is often combined with additional funds from major European lending institutions such as the European Investment Bank (EIB), the European Regional Development Fund and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. These major investment players are monitoring smart city investment opportunities closely. The EIB, for example, launched Europe’s first smart cities investment scheme in June 2014, in partnership with Belgium’s Belfius Bank. Together, they established a fund worth €400 million ($456 million) that is available at low rates to smart city projects.
Taking advantage of grants and loans Bristol is one of the UK’s best examples for demonstrating how this EU funding can be combined with national funding initiatives to eventually reach city streets. The UK’s eighth most-populous city has been awarded a raft of grants and loans since embarking on its 45
Delivering smart cities
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Bristol won the 2015 European Green Capital award in recognition of its efforts to become a sustainable city
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directly elected mayor and a keen supporter of the smart city agenda, said at the time: “Bristol is now the only city in the UK to have won funding from government to be both a super-connected and a future city. Bringing these awards together gives us a pot of nearly £15 million (€18.5 million), with which we can move really quickly to lever in additional funding and support from business to help deliver our plans.” One such plan was to Bristol is one of the UK’s best examples for demonstrating secure an advantage over how European Union funding can be combined with national Glasgow in becoming the UK’s first smart city test bed, funding initiatives to eventually reach city streets thanks to its collaboration with Bristol University – smart city voyage. Again, climate change and the smart Bristol is Open – which was announced in March 2015. This joint city agendas coincide. Bristol was selected as the European Green venture will benefit hugely from another pot of funding, this time Capital 2015 on the back of its efforts to transform itself into a from the EU. In October 2015, Bristol was selected as a ‘lighthouse’ sustainable city, with its pledge to commit a budget of €300 million city under the EIP-SCC Replicate (Renaissance of Places with ($342 million) to a key smart city aspiration – energy efficiency Innovative Citizenship and Technologies) programme and will and renewable energy – being a major factor in the decision. share in the €25 million ($28.5 million) award. At least €100 million ($114 million) of this money is provided by the EIB and the European Local Energy Assistance fund. Accelerating the UK’s smart city sector The Green Capital award is just one strand of Bristol’s strategy, Innovate UK, the funding stream behind the Future Cities which started even before the mayor’s office successfully entered Demonstrator, is backing more than just individual cities in its bid a smart city competition to win £50,000 (€61,000) from the to speed up the smart city sector. It supported the establishment Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK). The prize money of the Hypercat Alliance, with grants of almost £8 million received in 2012 was used to develop a business plan to compete (€9.9 million) to develop a smart city standard for the Internet for a more lucrative £24 million (€29.7 million) award to the city of Things (IoT). It also injected seed funding to launch the Open selected as the UK Future Cities Demonstrator. Data Institute (ODI) in London’s Shoreditch, with an investment In March 2012, Bristol was also recognised as a super-connected of £10 million (€12.4 million) over five years. In November 2015, city by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), which ODI selected Bristol as one of its 22 network nodes. had been allocated a budget of £150 million (€185.8 million) to create Winning national and international competitions for funding 22 such cities. The city was awarded £11.3 million (€14 million) to decreases the overall risk of the projects and gives banks help fund a scheme to install ultrafast broadband and open-access confidence to participate in some technology innovation WiFi across the city under the banner Gigabit Bristol. programmes without partners. Bristol has demonstrated how A year later, in January 2013, Bristol was awarded £3 million this can be achieved with great success. The city’s journey is (€3.7 million) as runner-up in the Future Cities Demonstrator not over, as it eagerly awaits the results of a further competition competition won by Glasgow. George Ferguson, Bristol’s first to become the nation’s IoT demonstrator.
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Delivering smart cities
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Saverio Romeo, principal analyst at Beecham Research, explains the route towards quadruple helix-based smart communities in the UK and looks at the drivers and beneficiaries of smart city projects in terms of citizens, government, academia and industry
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he ‘science’ of cities is still maturing and becoming more interdisciplinary in nature. A great deal has been written about the sociological, civic, economic and non-technical side of smart cities, with descriptions of strategies and roadmaps to lead the journey on the way to smartness. This journey can take two different routes. Some cities take a holistic view of the smart city and are implementing initiatives to cover carbon reduction, infrastructure and energy to all aspects of urban development. Others focus on a specific element of smartness, such as traffic control, parking or lighting. These two approaches require different technological choices. More importantly, cities must determine what information they
The development of smart cities needs to meet the requirements of all stakeholders should collect to meet these requirements and provide the services that stakeholders – citizens, governments, businesses and investors – are looking for. This means that the design, implementation and success of smart city projects are affected by different factors. Putting aside technology and the regulatory environment, it is worth discussing the other two factors in more detail. The first is the players. In addition to the technology vendors, a broad, and sometimes new, range of skills and line of business expertise are needed. Data and business analysts will be in demand and will need 47
Delivering smart cities
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The design, implementation and success of smart city projects are determined by a range of factors
the ability to interact with each other. New skills will be learned as challenges are identified and overcome. Systems integrators will be able to share successes in new projects. Among the technology vendors and enablers, no single company can supply all needs, so we cannot overemphasise the importance of stable partnerships. These must be carefully chosen and managed in order to avoid the break-up and collapse of an arrangement. Failure to secure the right partnerships at the outset of a smart city project has been known to result in its failure. Local government organisations are clearly key players, and the research capabilities of the academic world are also relevant. The city triple helix – the collaboration between government, academia and industry – can really become the driver for smart city success. 48
Citizens are the other key factor in the mix. The nature of services required by citizens will affect the type of smart city solution that is chosen. The players will have to engage with citizens’ groups and representatives so they become more than just users of smart city solutions. They want to be engaged in the process and contribute to it. The city triple helix becomes the city quadruple helix – the driving force behind projects, but also the beneficiary of solutions. The quadruple helix model for smart cities is being adopted. Bristol is Open – a research and development digital test bed used by the city and its partners provides an interesting example. Bristol is a city with an exceptionally high number of digital workers and businesses, second only to London. Bristol Is Open is a new joint venture company between the University of Bristol,
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which provides the engineering and technology know-how, and the City Council, which provides the social purpose. This partnership melds cutting-edge technology with city management. The project has deployed high-speed optical wireless and mesh networks, controlled by a Software-Defined City Operating System (SCDOS), thereby creating a collaborative ecosystem of participating academic researchers, civic and industrial partnerships. Together, these will develop and trial new and innovative services and applications for businesses and citizens. The open standards-based software-defined network has been built from the bottom up, using and contributing to open standards, with technology developed in the city wherever possible. With a significant proportion of the population being involved, the project leaders are confident this should guarantee long-term success and sustainability.
A continuum of smart communities For a long time, the focus on smartness has been too city-centric, creating a new form of ‘digital divide’ – a ‘smartness digital divide’ – between cities and the periphery. Here, the term periphery is used in a wide sense, from the suburbs of large cities to rural areas. The initial wave of smart city projects was almost exclusively focused on key applications for the centres of large cities.
Bristol is home to an exceptionally high number of digital workers and businesses, and a new project is melding cutting-edge technology with city management We then moved towards a more holistic approach to the concept of smartness. The term ‘smart communities’ was introduced, but the key focus remained the city, which is regarded as the core of innovation and business growth. Although this is true, city life can become difficult for layers of population, particularly in terms of the cost of living. Therefore, demographics are extending beyond the city. Citizens are moving out of city centres, enabling peripheral areas as a locus of innovation or a bridge between innovative places, and requiring more efficient transport systems into and out of the cities and within their wider community. The idea of a smart city is therefore transformed into a smart metropolitan area, comprising smart community projects such as MK:Smart, which is seeing the technical solutions that are being applied to Milton Keynes extend out in the direction of rural towns and villages. This creates a continuum of communities, from the centre of hectic London to the green landscapes of the countryside. The quadruple helix should then become the model for smart communities. 49
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The essence of open data A new strategy for data in London is set to bring the city’s smart ecosystem online. Andrew Collinge, assistant director, smart cities lead, and Stephen Lorimer, senior policy officer, technology, at the Greater London Authority take a look at the changes ahead
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n March this year, the Greater London Authority (GLA) published Data for London – a strategy that seeks to give shape and organisation to a complex city data economy. This is a move that is seeing City Hall shift beyond open data. Exploited to its full potential, data has the capacity to transform London into the smartest city in the world – a city in which world-class digitised urban services are the norm. Access to a rich variety of data from new sources is crucial to achieving this goal, and breaking down administrative barriers also plays an important role. In order to foster creativity at the micro level and encourage economic competitiveness at the macro or city levels, data must be harmonised. This will avoid presenting a fragmented data picture of the city.
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While London has a fine history of publishing open data, more can be done to exploit the value of wider city data. Moving beyond open data means sharing and using city data more effectively. This will deliver improved public services, more efficient infrastructure and wider data-led innovation. City data is more than just open data – it is also private data, commercial data, sensor data and crowd-sourced data. We have defined it as follows: • Open data: non-privacy-restricted and non-confidential data; • Private data: restricted and/or licensed data, including permission, privacy, publication and distribution; as well as data that is presently held privately, merely because it has not as yet been recognised as offering value;
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Delivering smart cities London is moving above and beyond the concept of open data, and has the potential to become the smartest city in the world
providers, retailers and land developers – all of whom have different considerations with regard to data and how it is shared, as well as different motivations around how it is to be exploited. Some partners will actively promote the strategy, some will provide services and tools, and some will be the direct users of city data.
Addressing London’s challenges Data for London is anchored in the big picture and local planning on the ground. Worth £19 billion, London’s technology market is the largest in Europe and, by 2020, London’s smart cities market alone could be worth around £9 billion. In The Future of Smart plan, the Smart London board’s recent update to the original Smart London Plan, goals are laid out for how the city’s technology sector will support more than 10 million residents in 2036. Published last March, this is effectively a road map for promoting the use of digital infrastructure and data in London. It is focused on three overarching work streams: • Engaging Londoners: using smart technology to enhance the range of ways in which we involve and empower Londoners and businesses; • Enabling good growth: harnessing data and digital technology to meet the growth challenges facing London’s infrastructure, environment and transport systems; and • Working with businesses: leveraging opportunities for innovation and business growth.
• Commercial data: licensed data, including permission, charging for access, use and distribution; • Sensory data: open and/or restricted data collected by sensors, actuators and devices owned by the public and private sectors and citizens; and • Crowd-sourced data: data provided, collected and distributed by citizens through the use of digital technologies and social media. City Hall should be more purposeful in how it identifies uses for this wider supply of city data from a more diverse set of data owners. This should include not just government and public services, but private-sector organisations – such as utilities, infrastructure
The plan is pushing city data in new ways. In Old Oak and Park Royal, the data is right on the ground. The Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation is undertaking the UK’s largest regeneration project, and planning and land here is directly controlled by the mayor. The Smart Strategy for Old Oak and Park Royal, commissioned from Hypercat, aims to turn the area into a world-leading location for the exploration and implementation of smart and data-driven technologies. City data generated within Old Oak and Park Royal is expected to support economic growth, enhance the environment and improve quality of life. At its core, Data for London seeks to establish the most focused and productive city data market in the world. The capabilities, talents and capacity of city data partners involved in the strategy are expected to have a positive impact on social, economic and servicebased challenges. To reach the point at which we are actively saving 51
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money in public services, incubating innovation in urban developments and communities and driving economic growth, city data needs to be recognised as part of London’s infrastructure. With this in mind, there are six themes of the data strategy, underpinned by straightforward, impactful priority actions that City Hall wants to take forward with partners: • We want to build and operate an efficient city data market by making data available for better city services, city infrastructure and economic impacts. Changing the organisational culture and capacity for open innovation is key to encouraging participation here; • Better organisation of city data is needed if it is to have impact in public-service decision-making, infrastructure investment decisions and broader innovation. This will lead to the better management of city services and assets, and will also be more effective in creating a true ‘city as a platform’ approach and new business models; • The value of city data must be recognised across government, industry and society. Value-based transactions, based on a shared understanding of monetisation, will be an important component of a well-functioning city data economy; • Public acceptance. A city data market will only be accepted by the public if security, privacy and trust issues in relation to personal data are addressed. Acceptance will lead to more data availability, which will drive the creation of digital services and eventually be behind their uptake; • Active governance of a city data market is needed to meet strategic challenges and opportunities. This is vital if new business models that underpin data-driven products and smart initiatives are to emerge and succeed; • A technology road map is needed to establish a world-class city data infrastructure for the GLA and London boroughs, based on open standards and flexible interfaces. Clear milestones are needed for the secure sharing of all city data, as well as the establishment of a city operating platform that is capable of handling Internet of Things (IoT) data at volume and speed, and the broader aim of establishing city-wide cloud storage and the analytics potential it can support. 52
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City Hall’s priority actions for delivering the new data strategy include building an efficient city data market that makes data available to those who need it
From data security and privacy to monetisation and harmonisation, City Hall does not have the expertise or resources to tackle the issues thrown up by the city data strategy. It is unlikely that anybody does. Tackling these issues and finding long-term solutions means adopting a collaborative and open approach with business, academia and Londoners – anyone who possesses data talent.
Innovative strategy Despite this, the strategy is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. It is innovative in how it gives a deterministic focus on using city data to pursue market opportunities that equate to more than the demand we can induce through plain procurement. In a new definition of city data, the strategy places extra focus on what sort of data, and whose data, should be used – either open, if possible, or in a secure shared environment if necessary – in pursuit of answering city challenges. This work on city data and smart technology is changing the way in which the government sees technology as part of the solution to London’s challenges. It is likely that the city’s recently elected mayor, Sadiq Khan, will appoint a chief digital officer to promote new technology solutions and make data work to maximum effect across the critical policy areas of housing, transport, cybercrime and the environment. After strategy-writing comes implementation. You are invited to be part of what we believe to be one of the first exercises of its kind in a global city. Help us to create a city data market that is capable of delivering benefits to all; that makes this sometimes ambiguous thing called ‘smart’ real, to all businesses, public services and, mostly importantly of all, to Londoners. For more information, visit data.london.gov.uk/data-for-london
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Security by design Old data security concepts are history – we need security embedded in innovation. Darren Thomson, chief technology officer and vice president, EMEA region, at Symantec explains how future technologies will have security at their core
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f you ask an architect to name the greatest achievement in their field, it is likely that they will nominate the 2,000-year-old Roman landmark, the Pantheon. The size of the dome means that it is almost physically impossible that the building continues to support it, but what makes it work is a special ingredient – the cement. If you ask an IT architect the same question, they are likely to say the internet. With the onset of the Internet of Things (IoT), we are about to start developing digital Pantheons with new foundations from which to build – moving from cement to the internet. We will start to create architectures and services that fundamentally change the way in which we live our lives, with the internet as our special ingredient to support where we are going. As our lives become ever more reliant on the internet, the security implications are enormous. Our virtual Pantheons need to be as secure as the one still standing today, against all odds.
The internet is constantly evolving, with IT architects and innovators creating services that will fundamentally change the way in which we live our lives In the world of IT we are very used to, and inspired by, questions that begin with ‘could we’. The technology arena is focused on and inspired by the art of the possible. We never cease to be amazed by what can be achieved over time with the combination of more and more computing power and our ever-active imaginations. When it comes to the IoT our minds are running particularly wild, but this newest IT creation will have far deeper social implications than any previous evolution. There are already endless predictions of what is coming in the not-too-distant future. From self-driving, internet-enabled cars, to wristbands that push us into going for a walk and tracking devices that could allow us to find our loved ones (whether they like it or not) in real time, anywhere in the world. 53
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Security is set to be a competitive differentiator between manufacturers, with the top-selling driverless car likely to be the one that is most secure
given the current drive for innovation that is (quite understandably) being encouraged by both the private and the public sectors. Manufacturers are beginning to understand the need for security behind these clever ideas. Whether it is for cars, buildings, railways or space stations, they are coming to realise that, in the future, security will be a competitive differentiator; it is no longer a feature but an expectation, and we need to ensure that it is inherent at the engineering stage. The biggest-selling driverless vehicle, for example, will not necessarily be the fastest or bestlooking, but it will be the most secure.
As an industry, it is time for us to start thinking about the ‘should we’ (as well as ‘could we’) questions. We have a duty of care to determine where, for example, wearable IT stops being just clever and starts being intrusive. We need to ask ourselves whether sufficient attention is being paid to the impact of such technology on personal privacy and the dwindling possibility of opting out of an internet-connected world. Throughout the history of IT we have built insecure We must be mindful of the potential systems before realising their flaws, and then focused on making them secure. That is how the security unintended consequences of ideas that even industry was founded. But that needs to change. We the cleverest technologists are likely to miss, are losing the benefit of the retrofit and we need to start tackling this problem head on. given the current drive for innovation When we reach the days of driverless vehicles, connected systems to control nuclear power plants and the rise of smart cities, we have to ensure that we are embedding The IoT is unquestionably in its infancy, and discussions about security into the design of whatever we are making. Security needs its implications often remain intangible. But let us now start to bring to become a key ‘fabric’ of IoT systems, given the amount of together the right people and skills, and begin to build some pilots personal information involved and what is at stake. – ensuring that these new solutions are ‘secure by design’. In the It is not hard to get excited about self-driving cars that learn IoT, security and privacy must be inherent and not optional features; from each other, connected homes that allow us to monitor and retrofitting security to a system with a million connected objects control our personal spaces remotely and smart meters that have a will not be an option in years to come. As we move to progress profound impact on a nation’s energy consumption. But we must these discussions towards the practical, we can make sure that be mindful of the potential unintended consequences of these ideas the IoT not only lives up to – and exceeds – the hype, but does that even the cleverest technologists among us are likely to miss, so with security and privacy at its heart. 54
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Delivering smart cities
Developing smart city ecosystems John Davies and Mike Fisher of BT Research & Innovation explore the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) to drive new ideas and assess the value in opening up data resources for exploitation
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t a certain level of abstraction, many of the IoT applications being considered appear similar, involving the collection of data from a range of sensors and other sources, interpreting this in a specific context, and building applications that offer improved information and decision support. Much of the time and effort involved can be spent on activities that appear generic. It would be much easier if data providers and application developers could offer their data or build new applications in an environment where these generic problems have already been solved by others, with robust solutions available to all players. This is what we mean by an IoT ecosystem.
IoT ecosystems An IoT ecosystem consists of a number of independent stakeholders sharing a common interest in particular kinds of information, and obtaining benefit from participation. This could be as a commercial provider of information or analytic services, as an application developer, a platform provider or end user, for example.
In Milton Keynes, the MK:Smart project is delivering innovative smart solutions to underpin economic growth The use of shared services and facilities generally involves a compromise – typically, giving up some level of direct control in return for reduced costs. In the case of today’s global communications networks (including the internet), the case for common services is very strong. The potential for an IoT ecosystem to enable innovation seems clear, but all participants need to have confidence in the value proposition and be convinced that it meets their needs. If this is not the case, then a sustainable ecosystem will not be possible. Areas of concern will include security and trust, respect for personal and commercial rights, dependability, performance, the ability to comply with legal and regulatory obligations, and cost. Predictability, simplicity and flexibility are particularly important characteristics. Stakeholders in an IoT ecosystem may take one or more roles. These include information providers, application developers, 55
Delivering smart cities analytic service providers, platform providers and users of information and applications. Information providers and users can be either individual or organisational. • Information providers in the IoT are often owners of sensor deployments. The primary purpose of their sensors may be for their own use, but they may choose to make some of their data available to others, either on a commercial basis, to meet their obligations (particularly for public-sector organisations) or for the general good. Information providers should be able to effortlessly publish data resources and advertise their availability via an easily accessible catalogue (such as those using the Hypercat specification) so that potential users can independently discover and assess their utility. Making data available must not imply relinquishing ownership rights, so the information provider needs the ability to define access controls as well as terms and conditions for use of their data. • Application developers produce applications that typically use a range of data. They should be able to discover what data resources are available to them, and assess which ones meet the needs of the applications they want to build. • Analytic service providers have emerged in recent years, and fit naturally within an IoT ecosystem. Typically, they use specialist software tools to enable efficient analysis of particular kinds of data, such as large datasets or high-frequency data streams. • Platform providers have a key enabling role in the IoT ecosystem. They do not directly provide information or build applications, but support stakeholders in other roles by providing a set of common services that all can use, allowing them to focus on their core concerns and accelerating innovation in the ecosystem. They may provide computing and storage infrastructure, offered as virtualised cloud services, for example. More specific to IoT ecosystems, platform providers will offer the facility for information resources and value-added services to be advertised to potential users. Catalogues need to describe both the content and other attributes, such as quality measures and terms and conditions. Ideally, these will be offered in a form that can be processed automatically. There is obvious benefit in a common approach to catalogues of information and services, which is a major motivation for the Hypercat initiative. Platform services also include facilities for uniformly collecting, transforming, distributing and storing data from many independent and heterogeneous sources. • End users participate in the ecosystem by using applications made available to them. As the ultimate beneficiaries of the functionality provided by the other stakeholders, it is important that their experience is positive and delivers real value. An IoT ecosystem will not be sustainable without the trust of its end users. Applications may involve the collection of information about the end user, such as their location. This situation needs to be addressed with care, particularly where personally identifiable or potentially sensitive information may be involved. Open engagement with end users to ensure they are properly informed and included in the ecosystem is essential. 56
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The MK:Smart project is a collaborative initiative that is developing innovative solutions to support economic growth in Milton Keynes. An important focus is the creation and support of an IoT ecosystem. In this example, the shared context is geographical: the city of Milton Keynes. The people who live and work there – as well as organisations responsible for transport, energy and water supply, and education institutions and businesses in and around Milton Keynes – all have direct interest in a range of reliable and up-todate city-related information.
The MK Data Hub A focal point is the MK Data Hub, which aims to support the emerging local IoT ecosystem. It delivers the platform provider role described above, offering a number of services to other stakeholders in the project. By spring 2016, the hub was aggregating and exposing data from more than 400 datasets, each of which may in turn be made up of many individual data streams from individual sensors or other sources. More than 60 local SMEs are engaged in the ecosystem in one role or another. An important feature is that the implementation of the MK Data Hub is designed to be secure, scalable and address commercial requirements from the start. It is becoming clear that the ability to engage a wide range of stakeholders in an ecosystem and to understand the advantages for each participant is a key factor in realising the potential benefits of the IoT. The MK:Smart project aims to illustrate the value of making information more freely available in improving current ways of working and enabling innovation. Demonstrating good practice, the benefits of making the best use of all available information and enabling new modes of cooperation between organisations are important contributions that are replicable in other situations.
Delivering interoperability As there will be many IoT ecosystems, each focused on particular kinds of information, interoperability between such systems – based on interoperability between data hubs – is essential. Hypercat is a specification for representing and exposing IoT catalogues, using web technologies to make it easier to identify and discover data resources. If each data hub were to provide a consistent and uniform machine-readable catalogue, it is possible to create a view of resources across a set of hubs, allowing applications to find relevant data wherever it is held. The Hypercat specification is a pragmatic starting point, resolving some important issues facing developers of IoT applications. While there are many technical challenges to be encountered as the IoT continues to develop, the establishment of effective cooperative relationships between multiple elements is a significant contributor to the success of IoT applications. The MK:Smart project is exploring some of the practical issues associated with creating an IoT ecosystem. Initial experiences are positive and the project is expected to provide a tangible illustration of the potential of IoT ecosystems, and to identify good practice that can be replicated elsewhere.
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Smart government The UK Government is leading the way in delivering services to citizens with a “digital by default” policy. Simon Michell explores its impact on the work of government ministries and the civil service
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n 14 October 2010, a letter from Martha Lane Fox, the UK’s then ‘digital champion’ and founder of Lastminute.com, was delivered to Francis Maude, who was at that time the minister for the Cabinet Office. Though seemingly innocuous on the surface, her concise correspondence contained some of the most farreaching recommendations to government in a generation. Entitled Directgov 2010 and beyond: revolution not evolution, the document set in motion a sequence of events that has the potential to transform the way in which both national and local government across the world operates and organises itself.
The ways in which government interacts with citizens, business and other organisations is being transformed in the digital age Lane Fox had been asked to carry out a strategic review of the Directgov website, which was the UK Government’s shop window for disseminating information about government services. However, she unilaterally broadened that somewhat restricted remit. As she explained in the letter: “I have not reviewed Directgov in isolation, but as part of how the government can use the internet both to communicate and interact better with citizens and to deliver significant efficiency savings from channel shift.” What happened 57
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Martha Lane Fox – the founder of Lastminute.com, who received a peerage in 2013 – presented a radical review of the UK’s Government’s Directgov website
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“The idea of the transformation programme was to take 25 services and either create a new digital service where none had existed, or to create better ones”
next was to transform Whitehall mandarins into global leaders of smart government implementation. In this scenario, ‘channel shift’ is jargon for enticing people to do their business with government online, rather than via a faceto-face meeting, phone call or by letter. Lane Fox was acutely aware that the internet is a far cheaper way of processing transactions or publishing information, as e-commerce websites such as Amazon, eBay and, indeed, Lastminute can testify. A subsequent UK Digital Efficiencies report, completed in November 2012, suggested that going digital could save the UK Government as much as £1.8 billion annually. In all probability, that figure may be the tip of the iceberg. Maude was immediately convinced of Lane Fox’s argument. A month later, in his reply to her letter, he said, “I am minded to accept your proposals in full”. By April 2011, the Government Digital Service (GDS) was established to implement its “Digital by Default” strategy. From the beginning, GDS was an organisation with teeth. Its head, Mike Bracken, was given wide-ranging powers to challenge the way in which government departmental practices were undertaken and to specify how things ought to be done in this new, transformed 58
world. Bracken’s job description as executive director of digital was to “change the model of government online publishing, by putting a new central team in Cabinet Office in control of the overall user experience across all digital channels, commissioning all government online information from other departments”.
Driving transformation After bedding-in the new department and getting a feel for what could be achieved, there followed a very bold proclamation. In January 2013, the GDS announced that within 400 working days it was going to transform 25 of the government’s most frequently used services, making them digital by default and also simpler and faster to use. First, they replaced Directgov and business support service Business Link with the award-winning GOV.UK, the alpha version of which was created in just 10 weeks. “The idea of the transformation programme was to take 25 services and either create a new digital service where none had existed, or to create better ones where there was an existing digital service,” says Mike Beaven, GDS’s transformation director. The government already knew which of its departments were the busiest in terms of dealing with individual citizens, so these
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were selected as the 25 services for improvement. They ranged from voter registration and applications for student finance, to tax self-assessment and arranging a prison visit. Previously, IT projects of this nature would most likely have been outsourced to an external contractor. However, GDS undertook this massive endeavour as a series of in-house projects, with the active participation of the staff from the relevant departments. “The bulk of the work was done by government departments,” explains Beaven. “From GDS we had about 80 to 90 people. We had front-line civil servants and people from policy and compliance getting involved in those teams and working with us.” Employing people on the ground that understand the users is imperative, he says. This goes to the heart of the GDS ethos: driven by user needs; simpler, clearer and faster.
Government as a platform As the exemplar 25 services have gone digital or been reborn as enhanced services, it has given GDS and the wider government community the confidence to undertake these highly technical programmes themselves, bringing in outside assistance only when necessary. The next step is to widen the concept into what Mike Bracken and others term “government as a platform”. This means using GOV.UK as a means not only to deliver government services
At the heart of the UK Government’s ‘digital by default’ initiative, GOV.UK enables quicker and easier access to a growing range of services seamlessly to the population, but also to enable citizens, businesses and other organisations to to generate their own value propositions from those services – be they commercial or social. One analogy is the national grid, which delivers electricity to citizens who then use it to create their own commercial activities, services and activities beyond the supervision and management of the supplier. So far, four platforms exist: GOV.UK for publishing and service delivery; GOV.UK Verify for creating a secure online identity; the Digital Marketplace (sometimes referred to as the G-Cloud) for accessing the digital supply chain; and the Performance Platform for providing evidence and metrics of the activities undertaken by government departments and agencies. The consequence of this innovative method of developing digital services is that the GDS, and by implication the whole of the UK Government and its civil-service support teams, has maintained control of the outcomes, enabling them to develop what the user needs, and not simply the easiest or cheapest IT solution available. Moreover, it has been able to adopt the most appropriate open standards and develop the uniformity across the system that works best for the user, not the owner. 59
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Smart urban mobility Simon Michell looks at the future of smart mobility and how vehicles and their technologies will enhance safety, reduce emissions and ease congestion
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smart city should be easily accessible to visitors and residents, and travel across the city should be problem-free. This is the ambitious vision of those leading the Smart Amsterdam project. Consequently, they are busy trying to work out how to provide what they call a “multifaceted, efficient, safe and comfortable transport system, which is linked to ICT infrastructure and open data”; in other words, a smart mobility system. They are not alone. According to Charbel Aoun, chief of sales and strategy, Enevo UK, “Mobility infrastructure has been identified as the number-one priority for cities seeking to attract investors, and as such is high on the agenda for many growing cities.” The challenges are many and complicated. On the one hand, existing cities have to find a way of reducing rush-hour congestion, as well as managing the traffic build-up resulting from the daily operations that keep the city alive between the peak demand periods. On the other, those developing new cities have to devise ways of avoiding these problems in the first place. Regardless of the position in which city transport planners find themselves, there is a growing consensus that simply adding capacity to the existing infrastructure only serves to encourage more of the same unwanted activity. What is needed is an imaginative approach – one that introduces a mixture of carefully designed systems that get more out of what is already there, alongside a concerted effort to change the behaviour of travellers. As Aoun suggests, “the notion of urban evolution is replaced by one of transformation”.
Guiding pedestrians Enabling pedestrians to reach their destination quicker is a good place to start when trying to improve the flow of traffic and people within cities. This doesn’t have to be purely a technology solution. Installing easy-to-read maps on the streets keeps people walking in the right direction and prevents congestion at intersections where the disorientated try to fathom out where to turn next. The Legible London project is a prime early example of how this is beginning to get more people onto the streets and help them find their way, The SF Park app helps drivers find parking spaces among the crowded streets of San Francisco
with clear signs installed around the city to help both residents and visitors reach their destination quickly and easily. Mobile apps are providing pedestrians with navigation aids, as well as the opportunity of moving up the speed ladder through the bike-sharing schemes introduced in many cities. However, the really smart solutions are those that use ICT, sensors and data to coordinate the infrastructure with what is happening on the streets. Transport for London’s Pedestrian SCOOT (which stands for ‘Split Cycle Offset Optimisation Technique’) and Oyster are classic examples. The former uses video cameras to sense how many people are waiting at traffic crossings and then adjusts the trafficsignal timings to suit. The electronic Oyster card system has helped to reduce congestion in ticket halls and at entry gates. It also prevents crowd build-up at bus stops caused by passengers finding cash to pay their fare. Smarter still are mobile apps, such as Citymapper, that enable people to plan and execute their journeys via a seamless flow across various means of transport.
Improving traffic f lows Roads present a trickier problem, but the challenges are not insurmountable. The Irish city of Limerick, for example, has increased its road capacity and public transport use simply by linking its traffic signals to a central system, equipped with sensors, that can respond to traffic fluctuations. An invaluable by-product is that Limerick’s traffic managers now have a complete view of the signal network and are alerted as soon as a traffic light develops a fault. The intelligent traffic sensors can also differentiate between vehicle types, meaning that priority can now be given to buses. A simple solution to another road-related problem – of drivers holding up traffic as they move at low speeds in search of a parking space – is to install dynamic signs at parking centres (linked to the internet) that tell drivers the location of spaces and the number available. This concept is now being taken a step further with the installation of sensors in the ground at parking spaces that communicate via the internet to let drivers know when they are free and how much they cost. San Francisco’s SF Park does this with a twist. Its system has been used not only to help drivers find and reserve spaces, but also to help city managers control traffic flows through the use of dynamic pricing. If the managers want to deter traffic from an area, they raise the price of spaces in the target location. Conversely, if 61
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Before long, cars will be able to communicate with each other, as well as with the people inside them Smart sensors on Limerick’s buses give them priority over other vehicles at traffic lights
they want to attract traffic, they lower them. Taking a further step forward, Mobypark in Amsterdam has opened up additional parking spaces through an app that gives businesses and homeowners a chance to rent out surplus parking spaces.
Smart vehicles Connecting vehicles and their passengers to the internet and the cloud is transforming the automotive industry. High-profile disruptive technologies and business models, such as transport networks Lyft and Uber, have already reshaped the taxi sector worldwide, and the 62
next wave of automotive smart technologies has launched. Having connected vehicles to the internet, the next steps are to connect vehicles to each other (V2V) and then to the city infrastructure (V2I). In September 2015, the US Department of Transportation awarded $42 million to accelerate the development of V2V and V2I technologies through its Connected Vehicle Pilot Deployment Program. As part of this project, New York City will install V2V equipment in up to 10,000 city-owned vehicles – buses, cars and limousines. The city will also upgrade traffic signals with V2I systems in parts of Manhattan and throughout Brooklyn to help in reducing congestion and pollution and to increase safety. Such is the confidence in this strategy, and the fact that it is a step towards the introduction of autonomous cars, that a further $17 million is being awarded to the city of Tampa to enable the same V2V and V2I systems to be installed in pedestrian mobile phones. The US is keen to get these systems onto the streets as quickly as possible and has announced an acceleration of proposed legislation that will require the installation of V2V equipment in all new vehicles. At the current rate of progress, it shouldn’t be long before the ‘internet of cars’ is as pervasive as the internet itself.
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Keeping the streets safe
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David Hayhurst explores the latest innovations in smart city safety and security technologies
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round the world, safety and security authorities at both national and municipal levels need highly comprehensive and responsive Internet of Things (IoT) solutions in order to cope with the everyday and the extraordinary – from street crime, traffic accidents and crowd control to natural disasters, riots and terrorist attacks. In order to provide smart city solutions, many of the world’s foremost IT and telecom companies are utilising the most sophisticated forms of 3D mapping and video analytics. These
Smart city solutions have been shown to improve the response times of safety and security services are used in parallel with the capabilities and benefits offered by sensors in devices such as smartphones to keep citizens informed and, therefore, able to be responsive in criminal and crisis situations. Meanwhile, intelligent software tools and Big Data computing technologies are enabling authorities to process and analyse the ever-increasing volume of information and intelligence data that 63
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is gathered on the ground. The smart design of these systems ensures the avoidance of information overloads that could adversely affect critical response times. The capabilities of these smart systems serve to highlight the inadequacies of applications elsewhere. Urban authorities, for example, are increasingly noticing shortfalls in the common practice of building siloed departmental applications, which are often lacking in competently sharing data with other relevant authorities. Clearly, IoT solutions need to provide optimum interoperability and connectivity – not only within departments and between other stakeholders, but also with an aware and responsive citizenry.
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Smart city solutions in Rio One of the world’s most ambitious smart city projects, the Centro de Operações Prefeitura do Rio de Janeiro (COR), was launched in partnership with IBM at the end of 2010, mainly in response to the devastating and deadly flash floods that struck Brazil’s second-largest city a year earlier. Public outrage over the slow and haphazard nature of the authorities’ response did little to enhance the city’s image in the run-up to the 2014 FIFA World Cup finals and this summer’s Olympic Games. Designed using IBM’s Deep Thunder short-term weather forecasting software, COR’s 400-member, theatre-sized operations centre has evolved in the past six years into an integrated C2 (command and control) headquarters for 30 municipal agencies and private partners. These include emergency services, meteorological analysts, traffic controllers, public utilities and waste collectors. Citizens have access to real-time traffic bulletins, weather warnings and emergency alerts via the COR website, its social media platforms and direct text messages. Largely in light of COR’s well-publicised success, IBM has been leveraging its early-mover status on the smart city market as a highly cost-effective and easily scaleable solution for cities, regardless of their size, that are eager to reap the benefits of real-time urban analytics.
Comprehensive security coverage In terms of ambition and scale, one of the few comparable active urban security systems is Mexico City’s Ciudad Segura, a joint project between the municipal government, leading national telecoms firm Telmex, and France-based defence and security systems manufacturer Thales. Ciudad Segura became operational in 2010, and is possibly the most comprehensive and fully integrated urban safety system in the world. The five-storey, 33,000-square-metre C4I (Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence) central command centre is manned by around 250 video technicians, radio dispatchers and telephone operators. It oversees five C2 centres spread around the city, which are staffed by more than 750 police officers, as well as two mobile units that can receive data from remote-surveillance unmanned aerial vehicles. Used primarily to monitor crowd density and movements, the mobile units can also provide comprehensive security coverage at major events. For 64
Mexico City authorities claim a reduction in major criminal incidents of nearly half from 2010-15. Vehicle theft has also halved over the same period example, it is used during the annual pilgrimage to the city’s Basilica de Guadalupe – an event that attracts more than six million people. Based on Thales’ Hypervisor secure service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework, Ciudad Segura prides itself on its level of integration and its responsive flexibility in the event of partial systemic malfunction – no small matter in this vast agglomeration of 22 million people. Mobile units that normally communicate with headquarters through a dedicated fibre-optic network can switch to satellite links if standard channels are temporarily out of action. The C2 headquarters now monitors 22,000 video cameras – 15,000 on city streets and 7,000 in metro stations – as well as a range of sensors throughout the city. The public is also served by thousands of loudspeakers, panic buttons and other response options.
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Mexico City authorities claim a reduction in major criminal incidents of nearly half from 2010-15, with police response times reduced from an average of 12 minutes to fewer than three. Vehicle theft has also halved over the same period. Aside from the advantages that Ciudad Segura’s data-gathering capabilities are providing to law enforcement generally, other agencies, including the city’s fire brigade and water management authority, have recently been integrated into the network.
A growing market With the global smart city marketplace growing so rapidly, companies are increasingly building worldwide partnership networks to enhance both their expertise and geographical reach. In September 2014, Cisco and AGT International, a Swiss-based firm specialising in analytics and predictive software solutions, formed what they termed a ‘smart city global strategic alliance’. AGT/Cisco solutions are considered distinctive and innovative in both their abilities to fuse data from multiple sources to identify real incidents and reduce false alarms, and their integration of multiple applications into one comprehensive solution. Their core product to date is the AGT and Cisco City Safety Solution, which is based on AGT’s CityMIND IoT platform. The
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Mexico City’s command and control centre embodies the future of integrated city security platform enables much faster response times through monitoring public areas, detecting incidents early, tracking suspicious activity, and enabling swifter responses through analysis of unusual activity trends and patterns. CityMIND can collate, filter and apply advanced analytics to data generated by, perhaps, tens of thousands of sensors located throughout a given city. It can then visualise the relevant information, providing operators with greater situational awareness. A CityMIND Safe Cities test project, involving a consortium that included AGT and Hitachi, was conducted in Singapore in mid 2014. Singapore’s government has expressed its desire to evolve quickly as the world’s first truly ‘smart nation’. While it has long had an enviable reputation for safety, Singapore must still deal with the everyday challenges of its rapid urban growth. Smart safety and security is a growing sector that must tread carefully between the goal of delivering increased security to citizens, while avoiding being perceived as introducing an allpervasive ‘Big Brother’ society. Successfully navigating this path will be critical if the sector is to continue to flourish. 65
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The power of smart grids Simon Michell asks David Hill, business development director at Open Energi, how demand management is shaping the future of electricity supply
National Grid is responsible for ensuring a consistent and reliable energy supply for everyone across the UK
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he trouble with electricity is that it cannot be stored economically. It has to be produced and consumed at the same rate at the same time. A good example of how this works on a country-wide scale is the UK’s National Grid. This former publicly owned company is tasked by the UK Government with delivering a constant, unbroken supply of electricity to the entire nation through its networks of power lines and substations that criss-cross the country. Its customers are wide-ranging: businesses, national infrastructure, homes, sporting
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when spikes in energy usage can be predicted, such as at the end of popular TV programmes when people rush to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, during the winter months when central heating systems are brought on stream or, increasingly, when air conditioning units are turned on during the height of summer. In its efforts to meet its statutory mandate to keep electricity in the grid balanced between 49.50Hz and 50.50Hz, National Grid asks some electricity suppliers to hold additional capacity on standby. They do this by running power stations below their maximum rate (part-loaded) or by holding peaking power stations in reserve. Whenever extra energy is required, the latent capacity held by the suppliers is introduced to meet the demand and, since electricity travels at the speed of light, this takes place almost instantaneously. One of the major drawbacks of the system is that it is inefficient and costly, particularly the firing up of dormant power stations during times of under capacity. Furthermore, managing the balance between supply and demand is not a fail-safe process, and when there is a discrepancy (what the industry call an ‘event’) then a blackout can follow. Thankfully, this legacy system is undergoing rapid transformation as new technologies, particularly the smart grid, are deployed within it.
Intelligent energy systems
arenas, airports, local councils – anything that requires electricity. Smart energy company Open Energi, sums it up: “At any moment in time, electricity demand and supply must be equal. Every second of every minute of every hour, National Grid must maintain this vital balance; too much electricity, and equipment could fail; too little, and there is a risk of blackouts.” This grid-balancing is complex, but usually predictable, as long as there are no unforeseen events, such as a power station breaking down. There are certain times of the day, week, month and year
According to Open Energi’s David Hill, “smart grids are essentially a digital layer on top of the existing infrastructure, which allows twoway communication flows to enable the system to react to changes in electricity consumption or generation”. Crucially, the introduction of the smart grid has brought about a much-needed facet to operational efficiency – the ability to smooth out demand patterns. “Once you are able to do this, you can get much better use out of the infrastructure by reducing the peaks and troughs that traditionally feature in the existing grid supply,” explains Hill. This is where a company such as Open Energi comes in. “Adopting a smarter approach to energy demand so that fluctuations in supply are met by changes in demand offers both a solution and an opportunity – Demand Response (DR),” says Hill. Open Energi is one of the crop of new smart energy companies specialising in DR that are springing up worldwide. Based in the UK, it works with major electricity consumers, such as water companies, industrial foundries, supermarket chains and university campuses. Whereas the ‘big six’ UK energy generators are installing smart meters into homes, Open Energi deploys smart grid hardware and software into the infrastructure of major facilities and establishments. This feeds both the company and the customer with a running commentary on how much electricity is being used by the elements that make up their internal network. This extremely valuable data is then used in partnership with National Grid to help balance supply and demand. “If, for example, a power station falls victim to a natural disaster, such as flooding or stormy weather at one end of the country, Open Energi’s DR system can look at options within the rest of the nationwide electricity grid to power down something or, more often as not, many things,” explains Hill. This might be a refrigeration facility at the other end 67
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CANAL AND RIVER TRUST
Bitumen tanks at Aggregate Industries’ sites nationwide, including Moorcroft Quarry, are providing demand response
of the country, or an air conditioning system next door. Whatever solution is used, the result is that National Grid no longer has to ask its suppliers to ramp up latent power capacity. In a stroke this eliminates the costliest element of the entire process. National Grid is well aware of this and pays organisations that sign up to provide DR. Not surprisingly, National Grid is also very keen to get as many organisations involved as possible and launched the Power Responsive campaign in June 2015 to promote DR across the UK.
Potential cost savings
The Canal and River Trust is earning revenue from demand response via its water pumps on the Kennet and Avon Canal, home to the flight of Caen Hill Locks 68
Smart grids have the potential of delivering massive cost savings to the business of electricity supply. Their information-gathering fundamentally changes the game. As Hill points out, “even without making any changes to the set-up, the more information you have at your disposal, the more efficiently you can operate�. In addition, the ability to balance supply and demand more easily, coupled with innovations made possible by the new digital layer, will make a huge difference to consumers, who will be among the beneficiaries of the new technology. The advent of the smart grid also aligns well with the rapid growth in renewable energy sources that generate electricity in a much less predictable way than traditional coal- or gas-fired stations. Although the smart grid is not new, with some maintaining that it has been in evidence for more than a decade, its ability to change the electricity dynamic is one of the major initiatives that should help prevent the blackouts that have been predicted by so many.
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Big data in action
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Adam Mactavish, operations director at Sweett Group, explains how big data could change the face of energy consumption in the built environment
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ig data is currently a hot topic in many sectors. As increasing numbers of systems, processes, sensors and devices populate the world around us, our ability to analyse, understand and improve increases. However, in the case of the built environment and the buildings we occupy, there needs to be a shift in how organisations manage and use this data to realise the value it provides. Over the past few years there has been increasing focus on the concept of smart cities. Major cities around the world are formulating strategies to upgrade existing buildings and infrastructure, with the ultimate aim of making them more liveable and sustainable. One example is the Smart London Plan, which outlines how London will harness its global status as a tech powerhouse to improve lives for the city’s inhabitants.
In New York, the owners of all large buildings are required to share details of their energy usage for public review every three months Although energy is just one element of the smart city agenda, smart systems hold significant potential to drive improvements in the energy efficiency of a city’s existing buildings. Key enablers of this are the roll-out of smart meters and the increasing employment of user-friendly energy monitoring and targeting systems. These provide better real-time, granular data on how our buildings are using energy and, more importantly, allow prioritised improvements to reduce demand. However, despite ever increasing amounts of data on energy consumption, there is still limited capability within the industry to manage what has been collected and unlock the value it holds. 69
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All too often, energy data is collected from across an estate to respond to a certain regulatory requirement, such as the Carbon Reduction Commitment or mandatory carbon reporting for FTSE companies, only to then sit on a server and not be analysed. This might be because the effort involved in gathering the data leaves no time or desire to then extract value from it. Real-time operational energy data has numerous benefits for businesses at either building or project level. It can be used to identify inefficiency, prioritise actions between buildings and between competing energy-saving measures, track performance over time to determine the return on investment and support recommissioning of equipment.
Generating energy benchmarks
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The data collected by smart meters could be aggregated on a large scale to enable policymakers to refine building energy regulations
Despite ever increasing amounts of data on energy consumption, there is still limited capability within the industry to manage what has been collected and unlock the value it holds
On a larger scale, data can be accessed from a pool of buildings in order for company or sector-specific benchmarks to be generated that are applicable to commonly occurring buildings and building-use types. If sub-metered data can be accessed, then component ‘end use’ energy benchmarks could be generated for use in composite benchmarks for mixeduse buildings. These benchmarks can be applied to compare performance, raise awareness of the opportunities available and, ultimately, provide better information to landlords and tenants, helping to create a stronger market for energy-efficient buildings. Comparisons can also be drawn between individual buildings within a dataset, and reference can be made to the context and features of those buildings. Existing IT systems enable data to be securely stored and made available in an anonymous form, while retaining the valuable associations with individual building context and features. Fledgling examples of such data systems already exist. However, much larger – and hence more powerful – data systems would be possible if this data could be captured routinely and consistently from across the non-domestic building stock. Increasing access to and awareness of data can result in a number of benefits beyond reduced energy consumption and cost, including: • increased resilience of new and refurbished building stock to changes in climate, demographics and occupancy patterns; • investment in energy-efficiency solutions that produce the expected savings with lower investment risk and a reduction in the associated costs of capital; • improved commissioning and maintenance of equipment specified to reduce energy use, avoiding wasted capital funds on unused or underutilised equipment; 70
• reduced downstream costs for the maintenance and other lifecycle costs of mechanical systems; • avoidance of misplaced value engineering that occurs when operational energy consumption is not sufficiently visible to be linked to capex decision-making; and • increased productivity due to the above. The vast majority of commercial building owners and occupiers have control over some or all aspects of energy use in their buildings, although it is often difficult to disentangle responsibilities in the landlord-tenant relationship. Many will have some access to data on the energy used in their buildings and therefore have the potential to analyse this data to discover how they can reduce energy use.
Accurate energy-use assessment Another benefit of the transition from localised data towards big data is the ability for policymakers and governments to accurately assess and monitor building performance over time. However, to allow this to happen there must be more transparency-enabling comparisons between energy consumption among similar buildings. For example, in New York, all large buildings must report operational energy consumption quarterly, and the data is shared and made publicly available. This approach should be adopted in the UK, with the databases populated automatically by the networks of smart meters. This data could then be used to develop realtime and accurate benchmarks, and be utilised by businesses to continually improve energy performance.
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Smart water systems are in the pipeline, but challenges remain. Alan Dron asks Laurie Reynolds, managing director of Aquamatix, how the Internet of Things will transform the management of water
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s the Internet of Things (IoT) increasingly becomes a reality, it is starting to permeate the world of the water utilities that handle both potable water supplies and wastewater flows. This will inevitably lead to major changes in the ways in which water is managed and potentially benefit both industry and consumers – but operators must be conscious of the new risks that the IoT also brings. Traditionally, the water industry has been a classic model of vertical integration, following a clearly defined path: from reservoir, to customer, to wastewater treatment works. However, one of the major changes brought about by the IoT is the potential for
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Smart water The Internet of Things is having a significant impact on the way our water systems work horizontal integration of those systems, with the possibility of adopting smart water-management systems that enable providers to expand the range of services they can offer. Moreover, the advent of standardised, modular control systems offers to remove water providers from their traditional supplier straitjacket. “Typically, legacy systems would feature proprietary protocols from one vendor and you would be locked in to that particular vendor,” says Laurie Reynolds, managing director 71
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of Aquamatix, which works with water-industry sensor and instrumentation companies to ‘IoT-enable’ their products. The water industry’s remote telemetry connected pumps, valves and treatment works have traditionally been monitored over that proprietary protocol from a top-end control centre, using dial-up over copper lines with relatively low speeds. As a 30-year veteran with Thames Water, responsible for control and automation standards in the utility’s engineering division, Reynolds is well accustomed to the restrictions that the technology of the day placed on its users. “Protocols were developed back in the 1970s, when there were no real standards in place for secure telecommunications,” he says. The incompatibility of the various communications networks reinforced the vertically integrated, silo mentality. Today, the IT industry has developed far ahead of the industrial controls community. The IoT, through which systems can talk to each other, allows water providers to interconnect these water and wastewater networks and assets to provide better service from existing assets – smart networks. “We’re aiming to achieve horizontal integration – that’s the big difference,” says Reynolds. “Having experienced the frustrations of building systems in the old way, I can see massive benefits in terms of scalability and much lower cost. We can put systems together in different ways much more quickly. From the systems integration standpoint there are significant efficiencies.”
A common language This is where Hypercat makes a difference, providing a simple means for discovering and interconnecting systems and apps provided by different parties. Furthermore, when two or more systems have to operate together, they need to speak and listen using a common vocabulary. The acronym SWIM (Semantic Water Information Model) has been coined as a standardised vocabulary that water engineers and computer systems can both understand and work with. Currently, changing a water utility’s automation or control systems is akin to replacing the body’s nervous system; everything has to be changed at the same time. “The IoT has far more modular components, any one of which can be taken out of the network and upgraded,” says Reynolds. In other words, it can be incrementally enhanced, rather than modernised through a huge block project. As well as the technical advantages this confers, providers can also defer investment, targeting it much more precisely on those areas that will most benefit from it. Maintenance costs can also be reduced – for example, by intervening technically at a pumping station when it is beneficial to do so, rather than routinely maintaining the pump every 12 months. A further technical benefit is the increased level of optimisation of existing infrastructure that can be achieved. Demand and supply can be better matched. Some water usage can be shifted to times of lower demand – for example, a garden sprinkler system can be programmed to operate at night and release just enough water to achieve optimal ground moisture, determined by a battery-powered 72
wireless sensor. Given that moving water around the UK accounts for 3% of the country’s total energy consumption, any reduction can significantly reduce both costs and greenhouse gas emissions.
Benefits for the consumer In terms of consumer benefits, the customer – if sufficiently interested – can get access to much more detailed information about their water system. However, Reynolds points out that “most customers really don’t care, as long as they have a reliable supply and their communities are not at risk of flooding”. Reynolds and Aquamatix are running a pilot programme with Veolia Water at Tidworth, Wiltshire, to test aspects of smart watermanagement systems. “It’s an ideal testbed to use for an evaluation project,” says Reynolds. “Our initial brief was just to replace the original Serck telemetry. We’ve been working with Veolia to create a smart water system
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Aquamatix and Veolia are trialling a smart water system at Tidworth in Wiltshire
nobody thought about water systems being accessed by outsiders, admits Reynolds. Given the fact that many systems operated through a system of ‘security by obscurity’, that was not a concern. Today, however, with so many more ‘touch points’ at which water control systems can be accessed, potential vulnerabilities not addressed by the original control protocols have to be tackled. This requires multiple levels of encryption. The protocol itself needs to be encrypted; any control system requires authenticated access, and the system should be sufficiently intelligent, with built-in safeguards to prevent anyone from taking it beyond safe operational limits.
there using the Aquamatix WaterWorX IoT system, which is a cloud-hosted system for monitoring all aspects of the As the IoT enters the water industry, water and wastewater networks. There are various business there are inevitably concerns as to its degree of processes, such as workflow management, a geographic information system and asset-management registers, that vulnerability to cyber attack... In previous decades, need to be integrated with real-time plant and equipment.” nobody thought about water systems being The telemetry has been installed and more detailed information is already flowing from it, warning of any accessed by outsiders irregularities in water flow that may indicate a looming failure of equipment. The two companies are about to move on to stage two of the project, to create a full-scale smart water The speed with which smart water systems will be implemented system at Tidworth. is uncertain. Reynolds acknowledges that the water industry is As the IoT enters the water industry, there are inevitably concerns notoriously slow to adopt innovation. However, the forthcoming as to its degree of vulnerability to cyber attack. There are particular industry shake-up, which from 2017 will allow non-domestic worries over the ability of outside parties to manipulate supervisory customers to choose their supplier, is leading to reorganisation control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. In previous decades, within water companies, which may accelerate the process. 73
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A byte of the apple Can a computer tell how well you are today? Can big data help you live a healthy life? Jenny Beechener asks Professor Ian Craddock, project director at the University of Bristol, how an innovative research project will help to improve the ways in which we look after our physical and psychological health in the future
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team of researchers from universities in Bristol, Reading and Southampton, along with their counterparts at IBM and Toshiba, launched the Sensor Platform for Healthcare in a Residential Environment (SPHERE) in 2014, with £12 million in funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The main focus of their work is to establish whether passive monitoring devices can be used to improve healthcare for people that have long-term health conditions. Using a combination of bespoke and off-the-shelf cameras and sensors to observe everyday activities, SPHERE researchers have developed a unique data-capture system that extracts relevant information to accurately portray the environment, and to monitor individual behaviour in real time. For example, SPHERE’s own ultra-low-power wearable sensor can deliver a reliable stream of data wirelessly in real time around the clock, ready to be fused with the other sensor and camera data. Mining and analysing this huge source of information lies at the heart of the SPHERE project.
Monitoring behaviour patterns The programme went live in 2015 at a residential terraced house in Bristol, equipped with an array of sensors and populated by healthy volunteers. The cameras and sensors capture information about eating and sleeping patterns, activity levels, as well as more detailed data about types of food eaten, sitting posture and even respiratory movement. Making sense of the data from the sensors is where SPHERE opens up new opportunities in community care. “This system, which is fitted throughout the house, monitors changes that might be associated with certain health conditions,” says Professor Ian Craddock, project director at the University of Bristol. “Lifestyle activities can provide clues about health. For example, if someone is sleeping a lot or eating less then it might indicate they are developing depression.” Each resident wears a wristband fitted with motion sensors that relay information about the activity in which they are engaged. When combined with data from the fixed sensors, SPHERE can identify behaviour patterns that can be helpful in treating certain health conditions. “Dementia is common in elderly people, but An anonymous terraced house in Bristol has been fitted with all the SPHERE project’s gadgetry, capturing detailed data about its residents 75
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Data collected from the residents of the SPHERE house will be used to develop opportunities in community care other conditions like diabetes and mental health issues can affect people in their 20s,” explains Professor Craddock. “Developing conditions early in life is probably a more significant driver for the NHS, as healthcare needs will be there for many more years.” SPHERE researchers have developed advanced computer algorithms to analyse the information collected and to extract relevant data that could be used for healthcare purposes. Although all data is destroyed for privacy protection reasons, the findings provide a valuable insight into health and behaviour patterns for use by an individual or a health expert. “People and their families have evolving health conditions. They are not static,” says Professor Craddock. “We want to create a model that can be used by different users for different reasons.”
SPHERE is investigating a variety of methods of powering autonomous body-worn healthcare devices. The functional materials element is carried out at Southampton University, while wireless power transfer, power electronics and lowpower systems work takes place at Bristol University. The first prototype wearable device to be developed measures just 2cm by 4cm and features a bespoke, low-energy Bluetooth connection and ultra-low power consumption. Powered by a coin-cell battery, these units are able to operate for up to 10 months and provide full-house wireless coverage. Researchers at Southampton are exploring alternative energy sources and, in March 2016, launched a removable insole that collects kinetic energy that is generated by body movement. Transforming kinetic energy into electrical energy is sufficient to power a small device, and the team’s goal is to make wearable devices battery-free. Further technological input is supplied by SPHERE industry partners. Collaborative projects include intelligent antenna design in partnership with Toshiba, and data-management activities that draw on IBM’s experience in this area. Both companies bring their knowledge and experience in the arena of the Internet of Things and smart city technology. “The project is creating huge amounts of data,” says Professor Craddock. “It will create two petabytes of data between now and 2018 – a large amount by anyone’s standards.” SPHERE researchers are applying machine-learning techniques to analyse such immense volumes of data, including a hierarchical Bayesian model that applies active learning and transfer learning to automatically select the most appropriate data. Researchers are also using predictive models for activity recognition and other tasks. With the residential house experiment up and running, SPHERE is now looking to widen its research to include more people and 76
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new locations. The team is inviting volunteers, including families with children, to move into the house for several weeks at a time. SPHERE is also looking to test the technology across Bristol, with the goal of having the system installed in 100 homes by 2017. With this expansion, the project will focus on collecting data from multiple sites and has created the Friends of SPHERE club as a method of bringing together and involving potential research participants in designing and shaping the technology, through a series of social events and research opportunities. Advisory groups have also been established to provide feedback on research recruitment, design and ethics in order to help the project focus on the user. The vision of the project is now firmly established, according to Professor Craddock. The next step is for large-scale research in partnership with clinicians, citizens and communities. By field-testing video and wearable sensors in different residential environments, SPHERE aims to show how data fusion and pattern recognition can help in providing healthcare support for all.
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Simon Michell talks to the chair of the Smart London Board and reveals how London is approaching the challenge to become a smart city
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ost, if not all, forecasts show that London will continue to grow at a rapid rate, and by 2036 the population will have risen to over 10 million. Such a level of growth will place the city’s infrastructure and services under immense pressure. To address the challenge, former London mayor Boris Johnson commissioned the London Infrastructure Plan 2050. London-based engineering and development consultant Arup helped to draw up the plan, which it estimates would require £1.3 trillion to complete. The London Infrastructure Plan incorporates the idea of data as a utility and recognises that the levels of sustainability needed will require the adoption of a smart city strategy, to make best use of the power of digital connectivity and the emergence of the cloud and the IoT. As part of the process, the Smart London Board was created in March 2013, chaired by Professor David Gann, vice-president (development and innovation) at London’s Imperial College.
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Smart London The London of the future will be characterised by the latest technology and digital data One of the first acts of the Board was to publish the Smart London Plan in December 2013. Like other smart city strategies, it seeks to balance a top-down approach that strong leadership can offer with a bottom-up engagement from the people that actually live and work in the city. This type of approach was shown to be critical in the delivery of the London Olympics. The plan categorically acknowledges the core role that the public will play: “To succeed, Smart London must put people and businesses at its heart – so that Londoners can propel the innovation that will make London an even greater city.” Smart London is about how the capital as a whole functions “as a result of the interplay between its ‘systems’ – from local labour markets to financial markets, from local government to 77
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education, healthcare, transportation and utilities”. It goes on to state that “Smart London is where the linkages between these different systems are better understood, where digital technology is used to better integrate these different systems, and London as a whole works more efficiently as a result – for the benefit of its inhabitants and visitors”. By way of example, the plan explains some of the priorities it will support in order to enable London to adapt and grow. These include: • computer modelling of the city’s infrastructure, above and below ground; • demonstrating how technology can reduce traffic collisions and improve traffic flow; • finding ways of reducing the number of e-commerce (white-van) deliveries; • the use of smart grids; and • establishing new markets for London’s waste. 78
A core cross-cutting element that will help to make London smarter is open data – a concept that sees the comprehensive sharing of as much of the data being gathered in the city as possible, aggregated with other relevant national and regional data sets. The Smart London Plan reveals a key goal about London’s data to make sure everyone has access to it: “We also want to make sure this data is accessible and meaningful to citizens, not just the developer community – so Londoners can compare and challenge public-sector performance. We will work to open data standards, simplify and customise datasets, with smartphone- and tablet-friendly interfaces, engaging content and tools to enable increased interaction between Londoners, policymakers and service providers.” This process has already begun, with the establishment of the London DataStore. Professor Gann is a big supporter and believes it is one of the main reasons why London is considered to be in
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Greenwich’s role in the EU Horizon 2020 Sharing Cities programme will see the borough develop and integrate smart solutions across a range of sectors
identify and bring together existing and emerging smart city activity across the capital. Currently, there are two SLINs: Smart London Districts Network and Smart London Infrastructure Network. The networks support SMEs and London’s innovation community to seize market opportunities and scale them up, focusing on three areas: connecting people and creating communities; navigation and transportation; and metering, monitoring and analysis.
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Home to numerous smart city features, the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is being utilised as a smart city showcase by the London Legacy Development Corporation the vanguard of the smart city revolution. He does point out, however, that working with the levels of unstructured data that the IoT will generate is a highly specialised skill and will require a new generation of data scientists to assist in creating frameworks and structures for that data. The challenge is to be able to “deposit data into a model, analyse it and then pull it out again so that it can be used in a meaningful way”. Gann’s academic seat, Imperial College, is at the forefront of this new data science and launched its very own Data Science Institute in 2015, including a state-of-the-art laboratory. This was made possible due to support from professional services provider KPMG and China’s ICT giant Huawei, which have both donated substantial sums. Imperial College recently launched its first suite of courses to develop the much-needed cadre of data scientists. Another important element of the plan is the Smart London Innovation Network (SLIN) concept, which has already started to
In March 2016, the Smart London Board published a second report, The Future of Smart. This 100-page document outlines progress made on the recommendations of the Smart London Plan, and sets out another list of recommendations for the future of Smart London. Its vast list of technology and social projects and programmes is evidence of how various agencies, authorities, businesses, charities and other organisations are adopting the power of digital data and the cloud to transform London into a smart city. Perhaps one of the most compelling examples within the report is the explanation of how the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) is utilising the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park as a smart city showcase and test bed. Many recommendations from the first report are being realised here, including data visualisation, electricity and water metering, environmental and fauna sensors, free provision of Wifi, renewable energy, smart mobility and thermal modelling. On an international scale, the second report also highlights the Royal Borough of Greenwich’s part in the €60 million EU Horizon 2020 Smart Cities Lighthouse Sharing Cities programme, which will develop, deploy and integrate solutions in the energy, transport, data and ICT sectors. Each of the three demonstrator cities – Lisbon, London and Milan – will also run experiments to see whether the systems they develop are scalable and can be replicated elsewhere. The report underlines the importance of this programme, confirming that “successful delivery of Sharing Cities will place London firmly at the front of global developments in Smart City development”. 79
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The Canary Wharf test bed Simon Michell describes the initiative that is seeing one of the world’s most advanced developments being retrofitted and futureproofed with smart city technologies
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he Canary Wharf Group (CWG) has been at the forefront of technological and social change for decades. CWG was, for example, instrumental in introducing open-plan offices to the United Kingdom more than 25 years ago. The group prides itself in having transformed what it describes as once-derelict dockland into “97 acres of London’s and the world’s most sought-after office and retail space”.
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It was in late 2014 that CWG launched a smart city accelerator programme, designed and delivered by ENTIQ. Named Cognicity, the initiative supports the development of groundbreaking smart city technologies by connecting start-ups with the expertise that resides within CWG, as well as within some of its corporate partners. These include such global household names as Intel and Arup. According to ENTIQ, “Cognicity is the city of the
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Since being transformed from derelict dockland almost three decades ago, Canary Wharf has been an innovator in social and technological change
explained the thought process behind the project: “We chose to run the Cognicity Challenge to identify companies and technologies that will help ensure that Canary Wharf Group’s developments remain among some of the most advanced in the world.” The competition was comprised of six streams, with each focused on a specific theme integral to the development of smart cities. Partners and sponsors provided guidance to the selected technology-provider entrants over a 12-week period, and the winners in each work stream received a £50,000 cash prize and the opportunity to pilot their solutions in Canary Wharf.
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The competition’s six separate streams each represented a critical challenge faced by cities. The idea was to select 36 finalists from the hundreds of entries received from around the world. Those selected were put through an intensive 12-week process, during which they developed their ideas with expert help. They were then whittled down to what turned out to be seven winners. Over the following months, Cognicity announced the victors and began the process of putting their ideas into practice. The winners were: • Sustainable buildings: Polysolar • Integrated transportation: Voyage Control • Integrated resource management: SEaB Energy • Automated building management: Demand Logic • Virtual design and construction: 3D Repo • Connected home: Puckily and BlockDox (joint winners)
future, realised today”. In essence, the project’s aim is to help in transforming Canary Wharf into a smarter, more aware space. In an effort to understand and respond to the workers, residents and infrastructure managers of Canary Wharf – one of the world’s most significant and rapidly growing financial hubs – on 21 October 2014, Cognicity announced a competition, the Cognicity Challenge. In launching the competition, CWG chairman Sir George Iacobescu
The streams provide a fair representation of the smart city sector, with only a few exceptions. It is no great surprise that other smart city themes, such as health, governance, safety and security, are not covered – after all, CWG is a property developer, not a city authority. This is reflected in the overall balance of the themes being targeted at buildings technology. For example, 3D Repo, BlockDox, Demand Logic and Puckily all have smart solutions that relate to building and maintaining the sorts of massive projects in which is involved. 3D Repo’s virtual design system is an open-source building information-modelling system that facilitates and encourages improved collaboration on construction projects. Demand Logic uses data analytics and infographics to find energy savings 81
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Sir George Iacobescu (far right), chairman of the Canary Wharf Group, with one of the Cognicity Challenge winners, BlockDox Although not among the Cognicity Challenge winners, Pavegen has also been invited to trial its power-generating floor-tile system in Canary Wharf The winners of the competition were announced at Europe’s largest accelerator space, Level 39 (L39), which was initially set up by Eric Van der Kleij and Claire Cockerton. Van der Kleij helped to scope out the Cognicity Challenge and was also in charge of L39 until late 2015, when he left to focus on his other main preoccupation: ENTIQ. Van der Kleij described the Cognicity Challenge to Bloomberg, saying: “The Cognicity Challenge is doing a worldwide search for the next generation of smart city technology that’s going to make ourselves (as a property developer) even more efficient, and provide better services for the people who come and work in our city.” and performance improvements in commercial buildings, while BlockDox and Puckily offer systems to automate and regulate energy usage in the home. Puckily helps the occupant connect all of the home’s Internet of Things devices to a single platform, resulting in an easy-to-use home-management system. BlockDox, on the other hand, enhances building performance using real-time data and predictive analysis. The company has even developed an app that enables building managers and residents to interact with each other. SEaB and Polysolar both produce energy-generation systems, with the latter having invented a transparent photovoltaic solar glass that is now found in one of Canary Wharf’s bus shelters. SEaB has also developed a waste-recycling anaerobic gas and water generator. The one winner that is not directly associated with buildings, but that is important to the people who live and work in them, is Voyage Control, which is a system that makes information available to everyone who can benefit from it. It can, for example, be used to manage freight deliveries to businesses. 82
Boosting creativity and collaboration Following the success of the Cognicity Challenge, CWG, ENTIQ and L39 have established a permanent ecosystem that provides a shared working area, as well as a dedicated showcasing zone for its members. Located on the 24th floor of One Canada Square, the Cognicity Hub features a demo zone in which the resident innovators can showcase their technologies, as well as a specially designed space that will, according to Cognicity, encourage creativity and collaboration. This collaboration is not just between entrepreneurs; it also encompasses corporates and innovators. The winners are not the only companies to have been invited by CWG to deploy their technology solutions within the Canary Wharf estate: Boldmind, Strawberry Energy and Pavegen have also been asked to trial their technology offerings. This is all part of CWG’s master plan to turn the site to the east of Canary Wharf, formerly known as Wood Wharf, into a home for major new technology companies that embody CWG’s aspirations to create and shape smart cities of and for the future.
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Old Oak Common and Park Royal Hypercat is supporting the UK’s largest regeneration project by helping to develop a smart city strategy for the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation. Simon Michell talks to Hypercat’s Dr Anu Devi, who is leading the project with her colleague David Cuckow, to find out how things are progressing
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wo of the UK’s largest transport projects, HS2 and Crossrail, will only ever intersect each other once. The place where this will happen is in north-west London around the Old Oak Common railway depot. This simple geographical coincidence has huge implications for the area. Straddling the London Boroughs of Hammersmith & Fulham, Brent and Ealing, it may not be a fashionable part of London, but it is nevertheless the hub of some of the city’s biggest industrial and commercial activities and home to the Wormwood Scrubs prison and conservation area. The consequence of the HS2-Crossrail intersection is that the area has been marked down for a thorough overhaul. The development will be the country’s largest regeneration project, with more than 25,500 new homes and 65,000 jobs planned. Former London mayor Boris Johnson was so committed to its success that he created the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC) to oversee the project. Previously, the only Mayoral Development Corporation to be established was that responsible for overseeing the 2012 London Olympics.
A new smart city will be developed at the intersection of the HS2 and Crossrail projects in north-west London Hypercat is leading the programme to help develop a smart strategy for the OPDC to ensure that no stone is left unturned in terms of establishing the area as a touchstone for smart city projects, and to make sure that the citizens living and working in the newly developed site benefit from the smart technologies and services that are installed. Before Hypercat could launch the programme, Dr Anu Devi had to gather a group of experts from industry, government and academia, using crowdsourcing and focus-group interview methods, to explore what OPDC should be considering as part of its smart strategy. Experts from the Hypercat Alliance, the wider community and OPDC’s network of smart thinkers were invited. Then, over a period of seven weeks, her Hypercat team staged 37 two-hour workshops at the Urban Innovation Centre in London to gather insights. 83
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“These workshops were semi-structured, designed to encourage free thinking and enthusiastic participation,” says Devi. They covered six main themes: access to data; clean and green environment; people-centric city and community services; smart utilities and infrastructure; smart and safe transport; and smart energy. In addition, several cross-cutting themes were relevant to all six topics, such as the citizen-centric approach, interoperability and security. Although the Hypercat Alliance was running the programme, Devi took a step back from actively promoting the Hypercat Internet of Things (IoT) standard, even though it has been specifically developed to facilitate interoperability. “We tried to keep Hypercat off the agenda. We wanted to hear from the participants. We wanted to know what they thought. We didn’t want to tell them what we thought, but when people brought up the subject of interoperability, we explored it,” she says. The numbers involved in each workshop varied, ranging from as many as 20 people to as few as four, with a respectable average 84
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attendance of eight across the sessions. Each participant was asked to consider what ‘smart’ meant to them as a person, rather than a solutions provider, and to think of opportunities, challenges and use-cases in which smart technologies, digital systems or other methods would have an impact.
Putting the citizen first Participants were also guided to think about the citizen first. In other words, instead of suggesting a technology solution to solve a problem, they were asked to think of the perspective of the person who lives in, works in or visits the city to understand the challenges that he or she may face. This would then lead to a discussion about the types of solutions, including technologies, that might be applicable to address each challenge. Devi notes that the task of the workshops was to “ensure that citizens or visitors were constantly at the centre of any innovation or recommendation that we might go on to make to the OPDC”.
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Among the topics considered at the Hypercat smart city workshops were smart transport and renewable energy solutions Over the period of the workshops, it became apparent that data, data privacy and security are core to the development of a smart city, and that technology is an enabler, not a solution in itself. “Technology can help in so many ways to highlight and resolve problems, but it doesn’t solve those problems that may be social or regulatory, nor does it solve complex issues that exist within societies,” explains Devi. When technology is relevant however, she says that it can drive operational efficiencies through its automation-processing capabilities and its ability to detect and manage issues quickly. However, it must remain flexible and scalable so that one does not get locked into individual silos. Smart city solutions must excel in being resilient, and therefore should not be heavily dependent on technologies that cannot adapt to emerging problems. This is especially pertinent in the aftermath of a flood or other extreme shock. In addition, ‘smart’ approaches should look at the relationships between different city systems.
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Another major challenge for the future is how to bring about behavioural change to make people act in a more sustainable manner. According to Devi, being able to use technology to make people more responsible and more aware of how they behave is going to be critical – particularly so regarding issues such as recycling and local energy use and production. Devi and her team have created an interim smart strategy report, based on the findings crowdsourced from the workshops. She is keen to explain that the interim report, submitted on behalf of Hypercat, includes recommendations that merely reflect the views and opinions of the workshop participants. It will be the responsibility of the OPDC to assess the viability of any recommendation before it is adopted. The OPDC is now considering the interim report, which was officially published in February 2016. This document relates specifically to local planning issues, while a report due for publication later in 2016 will contain all of Hypercat’s smart-city strategy recommendations. “What we produce will represent the views and opinions of the experts we gathered together in the 37 workshops,” concludes Devi. “We are not trying to influence OPDC, we are informing them and making recommendations. Whether the OPDC adopts them is entirely up to them.” 85
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Making Milton Keynes smarter Simon Michell talks to Geoff Snelson, director of strategy for Milton Keynes, about one of the UK’s most advanced smart city programmes, MK:Smart
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lmost equidistant from London and Birmingham, Milton Keynes (MK) is a prime example of a new town created in the 1960s to accommodate the overspill from the UK’s bulging capital city. Named after the 1,000-yearold Saxon village that stood on the grounds prior to the establishment of the city, MK creates and maintains a link between modern and ancient Britain. Like London, MK is set on a trajectory of growth, and between 2010 and 2026 expects to have built an additional 28,000 homes, expanding its current population of more than a quarter-of-a-million residents considerably. This rate of growth will inevitably exacerbate a number of challenges with the supply and consumption of basic essentials such as energy, food, transport and water. However, beyond the everyday necessities, MK must also remain a city that drives economic growth and engages with its residents in an exciting, collaborative and rewarding way. In order to address this challenge, MK has embarked upon a strategy of smart city innovation through the MK:Smart project. The city is fortunate in that it has managed to attract significant backers for its plans. In 2013, the Higher Education Funding Council The cityscape of Milton Keynes. The MK:Smart project’s Data Hub will acquire and manage large volumes of data about the city 87
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The task of keeping traffic moving in Milton Keynes will be aided by the City MotionMap app, which is expected to launch in 2017 for England (HEFCE) awarded £8 million from its Catalyst Fund to the Open University (OU), which is located in Milton Keynes, to boost the collaborative MK:Smart initiative. According to Geoff Snelson, MK’s director of strategy, this was just the beginning: “In terms of funding, it is not just HEFCE. On top of the original £8 million, we have also managed to obtain about £10 million in matched funding from other sources, including universities – especially the Open University, which is the project leader – and corporate partners such as BT, which acts as the main technology partner.” The MK:Smart consortium that has been built around these investments continues to grow and new associate partners have been attracted, alongside the other original members – Anglian Water, Fronesys, Graymatter, HR Wallingford, Playground Energy and the Satellite Applications Catapult. These include some big names such as Germany-based E.ON, Huawei from China, South Korea’s Samsung and Tech Mahindra from India. These major new partners have not only brought matched funding, know-how and equipment; they have also been instrumental in driving progress. “They have started to provide a very strong innovation ecosystem working alongside SMEs and innovators,” explains Snelson. “Those sorts of relationships can allow products to be developed, scaled up and taken to the market very rapidly. I think it is a very strong environment for the future, which is why we are very keen to maintain it.” There are, according to Snelson, two main ambitions for the project. One is to use data that is delivered, collated and analysed through the MK Data Hub to help address some of the main strategic challenges that the city faces as it grows – primarily finding ways to handle the expected growth in traffic, pressure 88
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on the power grid and rising water consumption. The second ambition is to provide an innovation ecosystem for the city. MK:Smart is therefore a multi-faceted programme of technology research and development projects run alongside educational and citizen-engagement initiatives. Snelson explains where the money is going: “We have got an exciting range of work streams. We are building apps. We are investing in infrastructure. We have got innovation competitions launched and managed via our new webbased platform. Perhaps most importantly, we have established educational initiatives such as the Data Schools programme, with which we are providing data feeds to schoolchildren so that they can develop apps. Also, there is the Apex Suite, based at the citycentre University Campus Milton Keynes, which engages with SMEs to give them access to the MK Data Hub.” The data hub lies at the core of the MK:Smart project and has been designed to acquire and manage large volumes of data about the city. Not surprisingly, this covers digitised information concerning day-to-day essentials – energy, transport and water. These data streams are complemented by facts and figures about the way in which the city functions and the citizens that reside there. At the time of writing, the data hub had 410 datasets distributed across eight themes: business, education, energy, environment, sensors, statistics, transport and water. Crucially, all of this data is Hypercat-compliant. “That is one of the conditions for people getting involved in the data hub,” says Snelson.
Monitoring traffic in real time Naturally, there are multiple projects taking place within the programme – from water usage monitoring to autonomous vehicles and smart energy meters, but a central MK:Smart deliverable is the City MotionMap. This is a project that aims to integrate a diverse range of transportation and mobility data with real-time feeds of activity – both pedestrian and vehicular traffic across the city. This will, it is hoped, provide a real-time journey planning capability that is ready to launch in 2017. “Getting immediate real-time data in a comprehensive way will help us address our mobility challenge. This mobility/transport data provision will also allow a range of other mobility services to integrate across modes and so on. I am most excited by this prospect,” says Snelson. There is a long way to go yet, however. “What we are doing now is demonstrating the proof of concept. We will have to secure extra funding once we have done that to flesh out the full range of sensors.” At present, MK is deploying cameras to monitor traffic flows and related activity, but has limited resources. Having demonstrated the utility through a deployment, Snelson is confident that sufficient funding will be found to scale up. “We are on the verge of agreeing a package to extend the project through local investment and other investors for another couple of years,” he says. “We are sufficiently convinced by the value that the three main partners are collaborating on extending its life for another couple of years. That, we think, will give us sufficient time to develop the commercial proposition that comes out of the MK Data Hub.”
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Bristol Is Open Paul Wilson, managing director of the Bristol Is Open project, explains how new forms of digital technology are being used to develop Bristol and position it at the vanguard of the smart city movement
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he ability to see the ‘big picture’ is a desirable trait, and a smart one, but turning big-picture thinking into practice is no small task. Different disciplines speak different languages, and organisational boundaries come with different reward systems and timescales. Getting along well with each other also takes practice and patience, and is a necessary part of addressing the big issues of our day. As we tackle modern-day issues, strong leadership needs to prevail over timidity, and nowhere is this more applicable and evident than in the urban context. In a bold move, the leaders of Bristol’s two largest institutions – its council and university – have chosen to address the challenge of building a smart city by creating a joint-venture company. It is tasked with working out both the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the smart city. The foundation of the venture is innovating in digital connectivity; working with other partners to
The Bristol Data Dome offers an unparalleled opportunity to visualise big data and city data in an immersive environment build a smarter, greener, more efficient city; and engaging with the city’s inhabitants. Bristol’s former directly elected mayor, George Ferguson, describes the city as “a laboratory for urban change”.
New forms of digital connectivity Demand for connectivity is outstripping supply in many places. Smartphone users and the nascent Internet of Things (IoT) are forcing the worlds of internet, computing and centralised telecommunications to deliver more. Bristol Is Open’s chief technology officer, Dimitra Simeonidou, who is also professor of high-performance networks at the University of Bristol, believes that software-defined networks are the best way to deliver such 89
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City-scale environmentalism In 2015, Bristol became Europe’s Green Capital – the first UK city to receive the honour. Stephen Hilton, director of futures at Bristol City Council and Bristol Is Open’s director of city experimentation, helped guide the path to victory. “Bristol is known for its community-led environmental activism and the Bristol Green Capital Partnership has more than 800 organisational members, creating a truly decentralised, bottom-up approach to environmentalism in the city,” says Hilton. “It was only 90
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heterogeneous and ubiquitous connectivity, with standards such as Stanford University’s OpenFlow and Linux OpenDaylight platforms accelerating progress. “New forms of software-controlled digital networks will emerge over the next decade, ushering in a new wave of connected innovation,” Simeonidou predicts. “Handheld devices, connected by hodgepodge ‘het-nets’ [heterogeneous networks], will soon be able to receive and transmit a gigabit per second. This will revolutionise mobile computing again. New ways of distributing media and connecting ‘thing-to-thing’ autonomous systems will become mainstream.” Bristol Is Open operates its own city-scale research-anddevelopment communications network, set up to enable and explore many of these innovations. “We use dedicated digital infrastructure, funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, to trial and test new forms of software-defined, heterogeneous connectivity,” says Simeonidou. New 144-core fibre has been laid in ducts owned by the council, to connect four optical nodes with strategic local host partners – At-Bristol, Engine Shed, and Watershed – with a dozen more nodes on their way. The optical fibre provides powerful backhaul to a self-guiding, self-healing mesh network that covers more than 90% of the city, based on 1,500 lampposts. It also backhauls a wireless mile of connectivity created along Bristol’s Harbourside in the centre of town, to trial established and new forms of wireless connectivity, including 5G, massive MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) and even Li-Fi (Light Fidelity). “The vision is to get the whole environment controllable in software, and to enable networkfunction virtualisation in a technology-agnostic network that works at city scale,” says Simeonidou. “This will create the ubiquitous connectivity that the programmable city of the future needs.” The city’s 100-seater planetarium in At-Bristol has been upgraded with 4K projectors, meaning it can present 2.1 billion pixels per second, creating the UK’s highest-definition display environment. The Bristol Data Dome is connected to the fibre network, which is in turn connected to a high-performance computing environment at the University of Bristol. It has created an unparalleled ability to visualise big data and city data in an immersive environment. The next step is extending the digital infrastructure across the Bristol city region, connecting four universities, four local authorities and a population of 1.1 million people. The population includes 60,000 digital professionals – the largest number in the UK outside of London.
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Divers prepare to lay fibre-optic cable into the riverbed to boost Bristol’s super-fast digital connectivity relatively recently that the council took on more of a leadership role. After winning the honour of Green Capital in 2015, it launched the Bristol Energy company, the UK’s first municipal renewable energy company, and the Bristol Waste company. But it is the grassroots activism that drives the city forwards.” Digitisation has a part to play in helping cities manage their environmental footprint. This is why Bristol Is Open is in discussion with two well-known eco-friendly organisations regarding the use of digital technology to quantify environmental factors at city scale; it is joined-up thinking that is becoming joined-up practice – a rite of passage for any city.
Pulling it all together The task of bringing digital, environmental and urban experts together is tough and breaks new ground for everyone, but a relatively small city such as Bristol is a good place to start. The heart of the city is home to 600,000 people, a vibrant art, music and food scene, as well as talent from around the world. The sense of shared culture and shared adventure is fuelling the desire to address pressing global issues. Hard-coding this into a joint-venture company and bringing together long-term industry partners is turning big-picture thinking into big-picture action. This approach is producing the muchneeded laboratory for urban change and, as it develops further, it will be usable by many people, companies and governments, bringing about meaningful international impact.
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Bristol’s smart city projects Stephen Hilton, director of Bristol Futures, talks to Simon Michell to highlight some of the smart city projects currently under way
Bristol prides itself on its use of smart city technology, not just for discrete operational efficiency purposes, but also to improve and enrich the lives of its residents. “We’ve got a programme called Playable City and another on citizen sensing,” explains Stephen Hilton, director of Bristol Futures. These are both designed to make living in Bristol a better, more interesting and surprising experience. Playable City, for example, runs an annual competition to find schemes to make Bristol more interactive and engaging for the people passing through and living there. Winning contributions have included a project to record people’s shadows and then play them back on the street after they are gone. Another winner created computer images of rabbits, dolphins and kangaroos that interacted with people as they passed by. Citizen sensing is a scheme to encourage residents to develop their own sensor-based apps to address local issues that they are passionate about. So far, this has led to mobile apps that deal with partner violence in teenage relationships, measuring local air quality and
even visualisation techniques for domestic smart meters. The latter example reinforces Bristol’s local and renewable energy schemes as the city boasts the first UK council to roll out a largescale smart meter programme for its social housing stock. It is hoped that this will play an important part in tackling energy poverty, and perhaps even help to identify residents who may be experiencing other health and welfare issues. Not surprisingly, Bristol has a range of more complex programmes that will help it become smarter. The Open Data Bristol platform is already sharing information across a wide range of topics, as diverse as crime, obesity, river levels and energy-related statistics, such as the growth in domestic solar-power installations. Bristol is also in the process of combining its police and fire headquarters into a smart command and control facility with all the functions and facilities that would be expected from a smart city. Bristol is also ahead of the game in terms of integrating driverless cars onto its streets. The city is participating in the Department of Transport-funded, Atkins-led Venturer consortium. This includes Bristol University’s
The Open Data Bristol platform shares information across a broad range of topics, including growth in domestic solar power installations Communication Systems and Networks Group, which is working on the wireless technologies, BAE Systems via their Wildcat Land Rover platform and Axa UK, which is helping to overcome the insurance conundrum. “If you have an accident, you haven’t got a driver as a liable person, so you have to think about liability in terms of the ICT and infrastructure,” explains Hilton. “This is not just about the technology though. It is also very much about the human aspect – not just for the passengers in the driverless car, but also the pedestrians who spot it coming down the road.” Along with the Venturer project, Bristol is involved in another driverless car consortium called Flourish, which has been awarded £5.5 million by Innovate UK. As well as looking at the wider aspects of driverless cars, such as the way an ageing and vulnerable population might be able to use them, it is also focusing in on the vexed challenge of cyber security.
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Partner organisations The Hypercat Alliance has a rapidly growing group of Associate Partners. They collaborate within an open LinkedIn group to keep informed about the progress of Hypercat and contribute thoughts and ideas to the Alliance and standard Advisory Board
Steering Commitee
Founding Member
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data, which is then used to make energy-saving
Arkessa enables organisations of all sizes to
of managing them in the billions. They understand
recommendations.
monitor, manage and control remote devices
how to scale up to millions (and scale down to
alertme.com
through M2M (machine-to-machine) and IoT
tiny devices).
(Internet of Things) technology. They make
1248.io
M2M and IoT easy to implement and
straightforward to integrate into your business, enabling the development of new services Amey works with public- and regulated-sector
and revenue streams.
clients to help create better places to live, work
arkessa.com
Accenture is a management consulting,
and travel. They are the faces behind the services
technology services and outsourcing company
you use each day – whether it be the roads, the
helping clients become high-performance
railways, schools, waste disposal, airports or the
businesses and governments.
power you use to fuel your home. In fact, almost
accenture.com/gb-en
everybody in the UK will use at least one Amey
ARM Holdings is the world’s leading
service today.
semiconductor intellectual property (IP) supplier
amey.co.uk
and, as such, is at the heart of the development of digital electronic products. The ARM business model involves the designing and licensing of
AIMES Grid Services is an innovation-led
IP, rather than the manufacturing and selling of
technology company that provides data centre,
actual semiconductor chips. ARM licenses IP to
cloud and business continuity services.
Aquamatix is a software company specialising in
a network of Partners, which includes the world’s
aimes.uk
real-time control and performance management
leading semiconductor and systems companies.
of water and wastewater networks and systems. Their WaterWorX platform is powered by
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arm.com
Arqiva is a British telecommunications
Axillium Research excel at enabling companies
Balfour Beatty is a world-class infrastructure
company that provides infrastructure
to deliver technology innovation that is open,
services business operating across the
and broadcast transmission facilities
collaborative and effective. Specialising
infrastructure lifecycle, with leading positions
in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
in advanced engineering and high-value
in major markets. Operating in over 80 countries,
The company headquarters is located
manufacturing, they work closely with industry,
in diverse markets and economies, they provide
at Crawley Court in the village of Crawley,
academia and government agencies to deliver
the assets societies need to function, develop
Hampshire.
outcomes that make a difference to their partners.
and thrive.
arqiva.com
www.balfourbeatty.com axillium.co.uk
Asset Mapping collects data from disparate
Bre provides a complete range of consultancy,
sources into a single source of truth about the
testing, certification, commissioned research
location, health and status of energy-critical
Badger Pass allows tech entrepreneurs
and training services covering all aspects of the
assets in buildings, infrastructure developments
to focus on their invention, the funding
built environment and associated industries.
and cities, visualised in real-time using Google
and the sale. They develop and implement
bre.co.uk
Maps. The open, non-proprietary platform can
sensibly sized processes and professionally
communicate with any asset management
manage internal and customer-facing projects.
system, coordinating data to deliver immediate
They specialise in the “delivery” end of the
benefits to the asset owner via resource,
business.
operational and energy efficiency, the savings
badgerpass.co.uk
Broadcom technology transforms how the world
from which can be reinvested to bring other
connects and communicates. A global innovation
assets on-line, incrementally creating a
leader, Broadcom designs semiconductor
comprehensive management platform.
solutions for the connected world. Consumers
assetmapping.com
might never see Broadcom’s products, but they BAE Systems plc is a British multinational
rely on its technology every day when using a
defence, security and aerospace company
smartphone, a wireless network at home or at
headquartered in London and with operations
work, streaming music or movies, or connecting
worldwide. It is among the world’s largest defence
to content that has passed through a data centre
Avanti communications sells satellite data
contractors; it ranked as the second-largest
in the cloud.
communications services to telecoms companies,
based on applicable 2012 revenues. Its largest
broadcom.com
which use them to supply enterprise, institutional
operations are in the United Kingdom and United
and consumer users.
States, where its BAE Systems Inc subsidiary
avantiplc.com
is one of the six largest suppliers to the US Department of Defense. Other major markets include Australia, India and Saudi Arabia. baesystems.com
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Partner organisations
Advisory Board
SMART CITIES
Steering Commitee
Founding Member
Associate Partner
BSI is the business standards company that
Cisco Systems is an American multinational
Dartt specialises in consultancy and software
helps organisations all over the world make
technology company, headquartered in San
development, with a focus on the transport
excellence a habit. For more than a century
Jose, California, that designs, manufactures
and logistics sector. Dartt designs, builds,
it has been challenging mediocrity and
and sells networking equipment.
trains and implements bespoke smart solutions,
complacency to help embed excellence
cisco.com
empowering operational efficiency. Its apps
into the way people and products work.
help companies manage fleets to minimise
That means showing businesses how
costs, as well as to reduce fuel consumption.
to improve performance, reduce risk
Subsequent reductions of carbon and particulate
and achieve sustainable growth. bsigroup.com
emissions lead ultimately to a cleaner, healthier, City of Westminster, the council that controls
sustainable environment.
this area of central London, provides community
dartt.co.uk
information, leisure, tourism, transport, environment and business information. westminster.gov.uk BT is one of the world’s leading communications services companies, serving the needs of
EDF Energy is an integrated energy company
customers in the UK and in more than 170
in the UK, with operations spanning electricity
countries worldwide. Its main activities are
generation and the sale of gas and electricity
the provision of fixed-line services, broadband,
Critical Software is an international company
to homes and businesses. It employs more
mobile and TV products and services, as well
that specialises in the delivery of reliable
than 13,000 people and handles almost six
as networked IT services. In the UK, it is a leading
solutions, services and technologies for
million customer accounts.
communications services provider, selling
business-critical information systems, providing
edfenergy.com
products and services to consumers, small and
software solutions and technologies that protect
medium-sized enterprises and the public sector.
individuals, give valuable insights, monitor the safety of equipment and guarantee that business-
bt.com
critical processes are carried out securely and efficiently.
Eseye is a leading provider of global cellular
criticalsoftware.com
internet connectivity for IoT devices, delivering machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions to businesses serving key areas of connected
Carillion is one of the UK’s leading integrated
home, connected enterprises and connected
support services companies, with extensive
cities. The company designs and develops
construction capabilities, a substantial portfolio
Ctrl-Shift is the world’s leading market analyst
innovative long-life solutions focused on real
of public-private partnership projects and
and consulting business helping organisations
business outcomes, offering global cellular
a sector-leading ability to deliver sustainable
to capitalise on opportunities. As trusted
connectivity and unparalleled lifetime service
solutions.
personal information sharing becomes central
and support to deliver the most robust and
carillionplc.com
to the creation of digital value, they work with
reliable worldwide network for the Internet
market-leading organisations providing evidence,
of Things.
insight and advice to make sense of market
eseye.com
trends, identify and size market opportunities, and lead innovation and change programmes for efficiency and growth.
ctrl-shift.co.uk
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Partner organisations
INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
Flexeye is the lead partner of the Hypercat
HouseMark is the leading provider of social
IntelliSense locks efficiency from the physical
Alliance. Flexeye also provides the platform and
housing data and insight. More than 950 housing
world by empowering people and machines
services to rapidly create active management
organisations are members of HouseMark, which
to make intelligent decisions. It is an industrial
intelligence apps for city leaders and their
is jointly owned by the Chartered Institute of
Internet of Things (IoT) company with an
teams. This is underpinned by an “Urban Fabric
Housingand the National Housing Federation
innovative technology that is one of the first
Model” that maps digital representations of
– two not-for-profit organisations that reinvest
genuine IoT platforms with apps and services
physical things to data, attributes and key
their surpluses into the sector.
that have production deployment at some of the
performance indicators (KPIs). City leaders can
www.housemarkbusinessintelligence.co.uk
largest infrastructures. intellisense.io
then see the risks and KPIs that matter most to them personally and take action to improve performance and outcomes. flexeye.com Huawei Technologies is a Chinese multinational networking and telecommunications equipment
KPMG in the UK is a leading provider of
and services company, headquartered in
professional services including audit, tax and
Shenzhen, Guangdong. It is the largest
advisory, and is part of the largest integrated
Fujitsu is the leading Japanese information
telecommunications equipment maker in the
accounting firm in Europe. KPMG in the UK
and communication technology company,
world, having overtaken Ericsson in 2012.
has more than 10,000 partners and staff members
offering a full range of technology products,
huawei.com
working in 22 offices. kpmg.com
solutions and services. fujitsu.com International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is a US multinational technology
Lancaster University, officially The University
Guilford Borough provides details on local
and consulting corporation, with headquarters
of Lancaster, is a UK public research university.
services, plus tourism, economic development
in Armonk, New York. IBM manufactures and
Ranked in the global top 1%, Lancaster University
and business opportunities.
markets computer hardware and software,
is recognised as outstanding in research, teaching
guildford.gov.uk
and offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting
and the student experience.
services in areas ranging from mainframe
lancaster.ac.uk
computers to nanotechnology. ibm.com The Highways Agency is an executive Living PlanIT is focused on delivering a platform
agency of the Department for Transport (DfT) and is responsible for operating, maintaining
that accelerates and optimises the delivery
and improving the strategic road network
Intel Corporation is a US multinational
of future cities. Deployed in association with
in England, on behalf of the Secretary of State
corporation headquartered in Santa Clara,
an extensive multi-sector partner ecosystem,
for Transport.
California. Intel is one of the world’s largest
developers, building owners and service
highways.gov.uk
and highest-valued semiconductor chip-
providers use this platform to envisage, design,
makers, based on revenue. It is the inventor
manufacture, assemble, operate, service, maintain,
of the x86 series of microprocessors, found
and decommission buildings more efficiently,
in most personal computers.
improving performance in terms of environmental,
intel.co.uk
economic, and social sustainability. living-planit.com
95
Partner organisations
Advisory Board
SMART CITIES
Steering Commitee
Founding Member
Associate Partner
it provides the scientific resources for the National Measurement System financed by the LM Technologies is a key enabler of both
Mission:Explore is a unique and inspirational
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
the Internet of Things and cable-free integrator
way for children to explore and learn about
npl.co.uk
that designs, develops and manufactures
their world. For you, it iss a free treasure chest
innovative wireless products using world-leading
of playful and rewarding activities that fight
technologies and standards, including Bluetooth,
boredom and nurture curiosity.
WiFi, Sigfox, Thread and Zigbee.
missionexplore.net The Open Data Institute is catalysing the
lm-technologies.com
evolution of open data culture to create economic, environmental and social value. It helps to unlock supply, generate demand, and to create and Moixa aims to change the way we produce
disseminates knowledge to address local and
London City Airport is located on a former
and consume energy through more intelligent
global issues. It convenes world-class experts
docklands site in the London Borough of
energy monitoring and control of grid-connected
to collaborate, incubate, nurture and mentor
Newham, six nautical miles east of the City
appliances and heating, and through smart-home
new ideas, and promote innovation.
of London and a short distance from Canary
DC micronets to power home lighting, electronics
theodi.org
Wharf.
and gadgets more efficiently from off-grid or
londoncityairport.com
off-peak sources. moixatechnology.com Open Energi works with its customers to turn their energy-intensive equipment into income. Its unique
The Mersyside Transport Trust is a bus
Dynamic Demand solution works with a range
preservation society with a collection of
Neul is the Gaelic word for ‘cloud’. The
of assets – from fridges to furnaces – and turns
Liverpool Corporation and Merseyside
company sees the future being realised
them into “smart devices” that can automatically
Passenger Transport Executive vehicles.
through a new, simple, end-to-end way
adjust their energy consumption to help National
mttrust.co.uk
to economically connect everything.
Grid balance electricity supply and demand on a
neul.com
second-by-second basis. This is vital to maintain power supplies and helps to cut carbon emissions and improve UK energy security. www.openenergi.com
Milligan develops places where people
96
are inspired to shop. It specialises in retail
The National Physical Laboratory (NPL)
development, injecting new life into existing
is the national measurement standards laboratory
centres, creating new developments from scratch
for the UK, based at Bushy Park in Teddington,
and delivering significant returns for investors.
London. The country’s largest applied physics
The Open University is a distance learning and
milliganretail.com
organisation, NPL is an internationally respected
research university founded by Royal Charter
centre of excellence in measurement and
in the United Kingdom. It offers flexible part-time
materials science. Since 1900, when Bushy
study, supported distance and open learning
House was selected as the location for NPL,
for undergraduate and postgraduate courses
it has developed and maintained the primary
and qualifications.
national measurement standards. Today,
open.ac.uk
Partner organisations
INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
ParStream is the industry’s leading Internet of
Red Ninja Studios is a creative technologies
The objective of SH&BA (Smart Homes &
Things (IoT) analytics platform company. The
company that is earning a reputation for its
Buildings Association) is to grow the market
ParStream analytics platform was purpose-built
innovative use of technology. The company
throughout the smart built environment
for scale to handle the massive volumes and high
has vast experience developing on multiple
for systems that deliver useful services.
velocity of IoT data. ParStream’s platform delivers
mobile platforms and is always looking into
shaba.eu
a new breed of analytics for the enterprise, such
new and emerging technologies.
as Geo-Distributed Analytics, which enables
redninja.co.uk
analytics at the edge. parstream.com Stakeholder Design offers bespoke design services to communities, companies and governments to ensure that future products, RedBite Solutions is an Internet of Things (IoT)
services and spaces meet the needs of the
PlāÇr is a public-transport-data aggregator
software solutions company that turns any object
people who will actually use them.
serving users, developers and operators with
into a smart object. RedBite’s founders were part
stakeholderdesign.com
timetables, departures, routes and performance
of the original architects of the EPC Network at
information through their transport application
the Auto-ID Centre based in the University of
programming interface (API) and their placr.
Cambridge. Since 1999, it has been involved with
mobi service. It is a small company with three
standardisation, implementations and consulting
employees, established in 2008.
blue-chip organisations around the world on
Symantec Corporation is a US technology
placr.co.uk
radio-frequency identification and the IoT.
company headquartered in Mountain View,
redbite.com
California. The company makes security, storage, backup and availability software and offers professional services to support its products.
Pointr is an innovative mobile technology that
symantec.com
enables indoor positioning and navigation.
Rolls Royce is a power systems provider,
Pointr’s base features provide indoor positioning
designing, manufacturing and supporting
and navigation - an indoor version of GPS -
a range of products and services for air, sea
using quick- and easy-to-implement software
and land applications.
combined with Bluetooth beacons.
rolls-royce.com
pointrlabs.com
Thingful is a search engine for the Internet of Things (IoT), indexing across dozens of existing IoT networks and infrastructures, enabling the discovery of nearby connected objects, such as energy meters, pollution
Science Scope develops hardware
sensors, radiation monitors, seismographs
QinetiQ is a FTSE250 company with more than
and software for science education.
and even planes, ships, bikes and weather
9,000 employees worldwide that offers high-end
Their products have sold throughout
stations, and any Hypercat-enabled IoT
technical knowledge underpinned by world-class
the world at all levels of education.
infrastructure.
research and innovation. The company serves
sciencescope.uk
thingful.net
as a trusted independent advisor to government organisations, predominantly in the UK and the US, including defence departments, intelligence services and security agencies. qinetiq.com
97
Partner organisations
Advisory Board
SMART CITIES
Steering Commitee
Founding Member
Associate Partner
Traak Systems provides real-time predictive
The University of Bristol is internationally
The University of Surrey’s Institute for
analytics based on its award-winning technology.
renowned, ranked in the top 30 universities
Communication Systems (ICS, formerly
It blends disparate live data streams from
globally (QS World University Rankings), due
the Centre for Communications Systems
many sources, including sensor networks and
to its outstanding teaching and research, its
Research) is a research institute within its
radio-frequency indentification into meaningful
superb facilities and highly talented students
electrical engineering department of the
and actionable business information and
and staff.
Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences.
dashboards in real time.
bristol.ac.uk
With around 160 actively researching members,
traak.com
ICS represents the largest European academic research group in mobile communications and networking. The Institute is home to the 5G Innovation Centre, the world’s first dedicated The University of Cambridge is a UK collegiate
Centre to research and develop standards for
Umbrellium creates and commercialises
public research university. Founded in 1209,
the fifth generation of mobile communication
participatory products and services that
Cambridge is the second oldest university
systems.
empower people to transform their cities.
in the English-speaking world and the world’s
surrey.ac.uk
It comprises a team of architects, designers,
third oldest surviving university.
commercial experts, producers and creative
cam.ac.uk
technologists with years of proven experience in designing and deploying award-winning VeriSign is a global leader in domain names
participatory platforms, such as pachube. com and mass-participation urban spectacles University College London is the UK capital’s
Verisign has operated the infrastructure for
umbrellium.co.uk
leading multidisciplinary university, with 8,000
a portfolio of top-level domains that today
staff and 25,000 students. It is the oldest
includes .com, .net, .tv, .edu, .gov, .jobs, .name
and largest constituent college of the federal
and .cc, as well as two of the world’s 13 internet
University of London.
root servers. Verisign’s product suite also includes
ucl.ac.uk
distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection
The University of Birmingham is a
services, iDefense security intelligence services
British red-brick university. It received its
and managed DNS.
Royal Charter in 1900 as a successor to
verisign.com
Queen’s College, Birmingham and Mason Science College. birmingham.ac.uk
98
and Internet security. For more than 15 years,
including the Burble.
5 Wythburn Place, London, W1H 7BU
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