12 steps to a Smart City

By Henk de Graaf, Managing Director, Industrial Automation Group, Perth

The idea of a “smart city” sounds attractive but what is it? A smart city can be described as a place which has integrated information and communication technology with control systems to manage its assets. These assets could include schools, libraries, transport systems, hospitals, power plants, water supply networks, waste management and parks and gardens.

Where once the irrigation assets in urban areas were treated separately from other assets, advances in automation and communication technology now allow for irrigation management to be integrated to maximise efficiency, energy savings and productivity. As this article by Henk de Graaf explains, the challenge is to work out the most effective and costefficient way for a city to be “smart”.

1.

Identify your assets. Start by looking at what type of assets contribute to the functioning of the city. Think of assets that have some sort of control or monitoring functions. That might be the air conditioning system in the main office building or chlorination systems for the local pool and the irrigation system in the city parks. Assets that are important, but which cannot be directly controlled, like trees, would not be included in your list of assets for control.

2.

Locate your assets. Now that you have made a list of the type of assets, find out where they all are so you can collate data about them. Knowing where items are gets you one step closer to getting relevant and detailed information about these assets. In addition, once all items are located, they can be identified on a Google map which will help with monitoring in the future. Remember that we are trying to improve the management of your assets (see map).

SmartCity controllers mapped as a way of improving monitoring.

3.

4.

Select all information about these assets. Data can include manufacturers’ manuals, asbuilt drawings and other similar information. It also can include pricing information and supplier details. The more information you can gather, the easier it will be for maintenance staff or sub-contractors to maintain your assets. If you have paper drawings or manuals, save them in electronic format to provide

remote access by multiple people.

Decide what you want to

monitor. When deciding what to monitor, keep in mind the financial or operational effect on the organisation. There is always a risk of information overload and if the collected information is unlikely to be used, there is no point in collecting it. On one hand, there would be no point in recording the kilometres travelled in a vehicle if it is the council’s policy to replace them every two years anyway. On the other hand, recording the energy used at sporting fields fits because better management might allow the cost to be reduced.

5. 6. Select how you want the monitoring to take place.

Monitoring can be done manually at fixed intervals or completely automatic via sensors and data recording hardware and software. So, if all you need is total power used and not when there are peaks and troughs, you select a different sensor. Similarly, if you want to be able to determine faulty lamps in a floodlight system, you will need to monitor the current draw to each lamp or sets of lamps which is something that a kWh reading will not tell you. You can also apply this logic to an irrigation system where, for example, you might monitor it on a

valve-by-valve basis.

Decide who will have access

to the monitored data. Some information that you gather might be confidential or could have the potential to affect a person’s position in the organisation (e.g. using a company vehicle for private purposes). It is therefore important to decide beforehand who will have access to the data. You may even choose to

It is important to decide who will have access to what data. For example, only departments responsible for water management might be given access to water use figures across the city.

7. 8. 9.

have a tiered access level or separate different types of data to be monitored from different departments. This could mean that the parks and gardens department gets access to irrigation systems but not to the fuel management

system.

Find out what you can control.

The next step into the transition into a smart city is to identify which items that you are monitoring can be controlled e.g. a weather station in your city will provide you with information only but a connected irrigation system will enable you to take data from that weather station to control the

rate of irrigation.

How many levels of access do

you want? The access levels to control systems normally are restricted to who has access to changing setpoints and who has access for testing purposes. You may need to make up a list of people who have access to all functions and a list of people with some sort of access restriction. Once you build up the list you automatically end up with different access levels. Try not to exceed five levels.

Who will be responsible for

acting on faults? Once you provide automatic control systems, you need to have somebody who can act when the system is not performing as it should. A properly designed system will provide SMS and/or email messages once a fault is detected and these can come in 24 hours a day. This means that it is important to allocate responsibility to the various alarm messages and the subsequent actions that need to be taken. Keep in mind that it is no good gathering all these fault signals if nobody is going to act upon them.

10.Find out what facility access

you can improve. In all councils there are a variety of venues that require access control of some sort. This can be simply by issuing a key to the club or function organiser or by using RFID technology to provide access.

Many local councils already use swipe cards for access to assets.

You may want to expand that by providing gate access to tennis courts or mobile device access to floodlights at the local sporting oval.

11. How is access to be controlled?

It all depends on how your city is currently charging your rate payers.

Some councils may be happy to fund sporting clubs out of general revenue while others are looking to rein in costs and are considering a user pays system. If you do want to go the user-pays way, a good solution would be to introduce a pre-paid option to minimise administration cost. The access to the end users can be controlled by the council through “enable” and

“disable” functions in the software.

In addition, you may want certain council staff to have remote access to this in case somebody has lost their card or password just before an important night game.

12.Who will be responsible for

the administration? Somebody needs to be in control of the administration and management.

It is conceivable that a person from Sports and Recreation will be responsible for that, but this might fall under finance or asset management. Ultimately, the person made responsible for this should be willing to provide some after-hours support so it would be no good selecting a person that is strictly 9 to 5.

Opportunities for the future

This is an introduction to how to implement a smart city system and no doubt there are many more hurdles to overcome before a council can say that the system works. It is important that the irrigation industry be smart enough to be aware of developments in this area so it can respond to the

challenges and opportunities.

As well as being able to identify when a system isn’t operating as it should, it is also essential that there be the human resources identified to be able to respond.