1,582 research outputs found

    Smart streetlights in Smart City: a case study of Sheffield

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    Smart streetlights can be used to enhance public safety and well-being. However, not only it is one of the most draining structures in terms of electricity, but it is also economically straining to local government. Typically, many councils adopt a static or conventional approach to street lighting, this presents many inefficiencies as it does not take into account environmental factors such as light levels and traffic flows. This paper will present the utilities of a streetlights in Sheffield and how different councils tackle the issue by using different lighting schemes. Investigation of current implementations of information and communication technologies (ICT) such as Internet of Things (IoT) in streetlights will be necessary to understand different proposed models that are used in ‘smart’ street lighting infrastructure. Case studies from Doncaster and Edinburgh are explored as they are using similar technology and having a similar sized topology as Sheffield. To analyze different models, StreetlightSim, an open-source streetlight simulator, is used to present different lighting schemes. There will be four time-based schemes: Conventional, Dynadimmer, Chronosense and Part-Night which have varying capabilities that will be simulated to present a plethora of solutions for Sheffield’s street lighting problem. The results from the simulations showed mixed readings, the time-based schemes showed reliable data from StreetlightSim’s own evaluations, however its adaptive approach will need to be further analyzed to demonstrate its full capability

    Smart streetlights: a feasibility study

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    The world's cities are growing. The effects of population growth and urbanisation mean that more people are living in cities than ever before, a trend set to continue. This urbanisation poses problems for the future. With a growing population comes more strain on local resources, increased traffic and congestion, and environmental decline, including more pollution, loss of green spaces, and the formation of urban heat islands. Thankfully, many of these stressors can be alleviated with better management and procedures, particularly in the context of road infrastructure. For example, with better traffic data, signalling can be smoothed to reduce congestion, parking can be made easier, and streetlights can be dimmed in real time to match real-world road usage. However, obtaining this information on a citywide scale is prohibitively expensive due to the high costs of labour and materials associated with installing sensor hardware. This study investigated the viability of a streetlight-integrated sensor system to affordably obtain traffic and environmental information. This investigation was conducted in two stages: 1) the development of a hardware prototype, and 2) evaluation of an evolved prototype system. In Stage 1 of the study, the development of the prototype sensor system was conducted over three design iterations. These iterations involved, in iteration 1, the live deployment of the prototype system in an urban setting to select and evaluate sensors for environmental monitoring, and in iterations 2 and 3, deployments on roads with live and controlled traffic to develop and test sensors for remote traffic detection. In the final iteration, which involved controlled passes of over 600 vehicle, 600 pedestrian, and 400 cyclist passes, the developed system that comprised passive-infrared motion detectors, lidar, and thermal sensors, could detect and count traffic from a streetlight-integrated configuration with 99%, 84%, and 70% accuracy, respectively. With the finalised sensor system design, Stage 1 showed that traffic and environmental sensing from a streetlight-integrated configuration was feasible and effective using on-board processing with commercially available and inexpensive components. In Stage 2, financial and social assessments of the developed sensor system were conducted to evaluate its viability and value in a community. An evaluation tool for simulating streetlight installations was created to measure the effects of implementing the smart streetlight system. The evaluation showed that the on-demand traffic-adaptive dimming enabled by the smart streetlight system was able to reduce the electrical and maintenance costs of lighting installations. As a result, a 'smart' LED streetlight system was shown to outperform conventional always-on streetlight configurations in terms of financial value within a period of five to 12 years, depending on the installation's local traffic characteristics. A survey regarding the public acceptance of smart streetlight systems was also conducted and assessed the factors that influenced support of its applications. In particular, the Australia-wide survey investigated applications around road traffic improvement, streetlight dimming, and walkability, and quantified participants' support through willingness-to-pay assessments to enable each application. Community support of smart road applications was generally found to be positive and welcomed, especially in areas with a high dependence on personal road transport, and from participants adversely affected by spill light in their homes. Overall, the findings of this study indicate that our cities, and roads in particular, can and should be made smarter. The technology currently exists and is becoming more affordable to allow communities of all sizes to implement smart streetlight systems for the betterment of city services, resource management, and civilian health and wellbeing. The sooner that these technologies are embraced, the sooner they can be adapted to the specific needs of the community and environment for a more sustainable and innovative future

    Adaptive Street Lighting Predictive Control

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    Abstract In this paper an implementation of a smart predictive monitoring and adaptive control system for the public lighting have been carried out. The vehicular traffic flow acquired using a smart camera has been analyzed and several predictive methods have been studied. Then, a control strategy based on the given traffic forecasts and on the dynamical street class downgrade allowed by the law, has been implemented. Experimental results provided by a real life testbed showed that the proposed strategy has high potential energy savings without affecting safety

    Greener and Smarter Phones for Future Cities: Characterizing the Impact of GPS Signal Strength on Power Consumption

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    Smart cities appear as the next stage of urbanization aiming to not only exploit physical and digital infrastructure for urban development but also the intellectual and social capital as its core ingredient for urbanization. Smart cities harness the power of data from sensors in order to understand and manage city systems. The most important of these sensing devices are smartphones as they provide the most important means to connect the smart city systems with its citizens, allowing personalization n and cocreation. The battery lifetime of smartphones is one of the most important parameters in achieving good user experience for the device. Therefore, the management and the optimization of handheld device applications in relation to their power consumption are an important area of research. This paper investigates the relationship between the energy consumption of a localization application and the strength of the global positioning system (GPS) signal. This is an important focus, because location-based applications are among the top power-hungry applications. We conduct experiments on two android location-based applications, one developed by us, and the other one, off the shelf. We use the results from the measurements of the two applications to derive a mathematical model that describes the power consumption in smartphones in terms of SNR and the time to first fix. The results from this study show that higher SNR values of GPS signals do consume less energy, while low GPS signals causing faster battery drain (38% as compared with 13%). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that provides a quantitative understanding of how the poor strength (SNR) of satellite signals will cause relatively higher power drain from a smartphone\u27s battery

    Security and the smart city: A systematic review

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    The implementation of smart technology in cities is often hailed as the solution to many urban challenges such as transportation, waste management, and environmental protection. Issues of security and crime prevention, however, are in many cases neglected. Moreover, when researchers do introduce new smart security technologies, they rarely discuss their implementation or question how new smart city security might affect traditional policing and urban planning processes. This systematic review explores the recent literature concerned with new ‘smart city’ security technologies and aims to investigate to what extent these new interventions correspond with traditional functions of security interventions. Through an extensive literature search we compiled a list of security interventions for smart cities and suggest several changes to the conceptual status quo in the field. Ultimately, we propose three clear categories to categorise security interventions in smart cities: Those interventions that use new sensors but traditional actuators, those that seek to make old systems smart, and those that introduce entirely new functions. These themes are then discussed in detail and the importance of each group of interventions for the overall field of urban security and governance is assessed
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