How Practical Are Smart Cities? Breaking Down The Challenges And Solutions Involved In the Smart City Development | X-Byte Enterprise Solutions

Imagine a world that is completely automated, where technology rules the space. For a moment, close your eyes and pick yourself out from the environment you’re in and transport to an alternate dimension — something in the future — where you’re in a driverless car.

You’re being transported to your destination through a myriad of automated traffic signals, who are constantly monitoring traffic. Traffic offenders are getting instant challans on their apps and emails and fine is getting cut from their wallets.

You pass through hyperloops that are zooming past you overhead. Those are driverless, too. Your autonomous car is taking an involuntary turn to recharge its battery for the rest of the journey in a pod. While getting your car charged, you receive statistics on the amount of energy you’ve consumed for the month with detailed analysis of the equipment consuming the most electricity. You also receive a leader board of how you fare against your neighbours.

Meanwhile, you witness a drone delivering a food order to a car owner next to yours. And when you look at the shops, you see no cashiers. People are simply walking in, picking their preferred groceries and items and walking out. But the money is getting cut from their respective accounts.

You step out from your car for a moment and see a world where the most redundant jobs have been replaced by tech systems and robots. All you see are industrious people doing their preferred jobs. Wage gaps have been settled and education has been made more universal.

How does this feel? Well, this is exactly how our world would be in the next decade or so with the rapid onset of smart cities.

As part of our Digital Transformations in Real Estate Series guide, we have been sharing crucial details on diverse aspects of real estate such as challenges and solutions in leasing, mortgaging, renting, construction and engineering and more. And on this post, we are dedicating an entire chapter on the most ambitious and futuristic project the entire world is gearing up for — smart cities.

So, let’s get started with understanding what smart cities are, how practical they are in terms of their implementations, the shortcomings in their development, some practical use cases and more.

But before that, let’s look at some important statistics on smart cities.

Smart Cities Facts and Figures

• By the year 2025, the number of megacities in the world is anticipated to be around 29.
• According to Cisco, cities and infrastructure running on data and information can improve energy efficiency by 30% within two decades of their implementation.
• The market opportunity in smart cities is anticipated to be $34bn annually.
• Mobility remains the top segment in smart cities.
• The shipments of connected cars worldwide is anticipated to be around 76.3mn units by 2023.
• There would be around 2.79bn 5G subscriptions globally by 2024.

IoT in Real Estate

If you’ve read one of our previous posts, you would recollect that real estate remains as one of the least digitized industries in the world. This means that the integration of several modern-day tech offerings are yet to see the light of the day in real estate. However, research is also being conducted and tested out in several spaces on newer tech implementations such as blockchain systems, home automation devices, advanced property hunting and management systems, real estate surveillance systems and more to disrupt the space with the Internet of Things.

To visualize an entire city that is connected, bubbles of prototypes have to be conceived, tested and deployed for optimized results. It is only through these results that large-scale deployment and transformations across a massive geographical landscape can happen.

While visualizing the perfect world where seamless automation is making our lives seamless appears easy, it’s only when you think of the practicalities associated with its implementations that the challenges gradually start to make sense.

To understand what the challenges and shortcomings are, we need to define the scope of a smart city and understand what it actually means.

Defining A Smart City and Its Scope

Technically, there’s no definition of smart cities whatsoever. It’s more about the interpretation of a concept, where technology is at the fulcrum of most processes and operations on a larger scale — to the extent that public infrastructure, utilities, facilities and more are empowered by advanced technologies.

The implementation of such technologies is to bring in a revolution that has been unheard of before across all types of landscapes. Smart cities could pave the way for farming in the middle of a concrete jungle or have a connected network taking care of rural electrification. To make smart cities possible, several independent systems and facilities must be made smarter and put together.

Holistically, a smart city will have elements such as:

• Smart buildings
• Smart transportation systems
• Smart infrastructure
• Smart healthcare systems
• Interactive education panels
• Smart street lighting or illumination
• Connected or autonomous cars
• Smart power grids
• Smart water plants and sewage systems and more

While these sounds ambitious, it is definitely not easy to implement them in the future. A lot of intricacies exist in their integration right from setting them up to their usability and user education.

And that brings us to our next section.

The Three Most Critical Requirements of a Smart City

Open Data

Data generation is an inevitable aspect of smart cities or any data-driven system or infrastructure for that matter. It is through the data we generate that the systems process, analyse, interpret and present information to us and to take autonomous decisions. In such cases, it really becomes difficult to generate massive volumes of data on a larger scale on a daily basis.

To give you an idea, understand that back in 2018, we generated around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day. And in the last two years, there has been a tremendous rise in the use of more devices, leading to user-based and machine-based data generation. Another research indicates that there would be close to 200bn devices by 2020. This makes it clear that efficient data generation and processing systems have to be deployed and maintained on a regular basis.

Citizen Engagement

The government or implementing body should engage the entire population of a city in the concept of smart cities. And the services included are not ancillary but fundamental which would have implications in their everyday life if not engaged properly. From inefficient power grids to poor traffic systems, improper engagement could mean chaos in cities. Besides, people should also be educated on how to use apps and different technologies to feel included in the city.

Enhanced Services for Citizens

The implementing body should also take care of aligning every new comer in the city with the smart city protocols and practices. This should happen besides educating the existing citizens on tech best practices and conflict handling in case of malfunctions and errors. Once these are fixed, the bodies should also look at offering optimized services which are predictive in nature, which is at the very heart of smart cities.

With these basic ideas in mind, let’s dive in a little deeper to understand some other crucial challenges involved in implementing a smart city.

Infrastructure

Smart cities are massive networks of the Internet of Things. And IoT models are networks of connected devices which make use of hardware peripherals like sensors, devices, embedded systems, cloud architecture, circuitries, software applications and more to get any job done.

So, when we are talking about large-scale implementations, we need to understand the scale at which such sensors and devices must be procured and installed in cities. And these devices need to be perpetually on, which means we need to figure out their sustainability in terms of energy sources.

Will they be powered by renewable energy sources like solar or wind energy? Or, will they have non-renewable energy sources powering them perennially?

And when it comes to their deployment, previously existing infrastructure has to be either removed or modernized. So, we need to consider existing tunnels, pipelines, sewage systems, transportation facilities, power grids and more before we begin with the overhaul process.

Along with these, we should also procure appropriate licencing, quality assurances and more. Most importantly, all these come at expensive price tags.

Cybersecurity

An entire city connected collectively to the internet is no joke. While it makes things look cool and seamless, the level of cybersecurity involved is inexplicable. When the whole city is powered by devices, it becomes a Disneyland for hackers, who are consistently finding newer ways to exploit vulnerabilities. And to maintain airtight cybersecurity of all devices at all times still needs more work both on paper and practicality. Advanced hacking mechanisms need to be studied, options on blockchain need to be explored and newer blends of digital systems need to be developed to prevent attacks, breaches and intrusions.

Because we are dealing with money, money’s worth, people’s life and livelihood, cybersecurity in smart cities has to be of prime importance. And currently, it is a huge challenge.

Privacy Concerns

It was not until a couple of years back that data privacy was taken seriously by companies and governments across the world. In several third world countries, there are still no hard and fast regulations and policies that govern data privacy. Privacy policies are still vague and dicey and there’s lack of clarity among people on what data is collected, stored, processed and shared.

In such cases, data privacy becomes a major concern when everything associated with our life and city is connected to the internet. Cameras, sensors, alarms, notifications, public personalization and more are concepts people are still not ready for. Apart from giving people anxiety, these implementations could sort of backfire on their purposes as well.

Educating Communities

Anything that is new in the market or life comes with a learning curve. This could be the new smartphone app we are trying to work with, a new device we’re trying to understand, the controls on a refrigerator, a connected car or more. All these tech-driven products and services have a learning curve that requires people to update their knowledge and experience on how to use them.

Though several products and services today are commercial and optional, implementing a concept like a smart city would mean that these become mandatory. And regardless of whether people are tech-savvy or not, they have to upskill and learn new concepts of operations. And before that, they should also shell out money to upgrade their lifestyles to meet the demands of smart city integrations.

Being Socially Inclusive

Social inclusivity is all about ensuring everyone feels part of an ecosystem without feeling threatened, vulnerable or uncomfortable. But with large-scale implementation of tech, social inclusivity cannot be expected. This is because several ‘options’ currently would become mandates tomorrow.

For instance, an elderly person preferring to write letters would be forced to sign up for an email account tomorrow. Or someone who intends to leave no digital footprints because of various reasons needs to be online all the time. And there are also those who find it tough to use technology or tech devices.

A smart city, in its early stages, will find it tough to make everyone comfortable using its utilities and services.

Interoperability of Systems

An IoT infrastructure works because of the interoperability of systems and data. There is seamless data generation and transactions happening at all times to ensure the system as one unit is alert, alive and making informed decisions. But too many devices and systems in a network can make it complex to enable interoperability of systems.

For this, we would need equally massive and complex algorithms and moderation systems that would ensure tasks are executed perpetually without any hassle.

City-wide Connectivity

Let’s start with the basis. To make a city smart, we should start by making the internet accessible to all. For this, we need to ensure telecom companies offer cheaper data services or deploy free wireless hotspots at subsidies across the city. And because the entire city would be connected, there could be fluctuations in speed.

To tackle this, we need advanced spectrums like 5G to be made available at all places. From the remotest place in the city to the heart of it so people across all lanes, avenues and streets get to experience a unanimous speed at all times. And it’s not just people who are connected but devices and machines as well. Either a separate channel or ways to split bandwidth among devices and people’s gadgets should be set up and maintained.

With several countries still awaiting 4G and ideal internet services, envisioning a perpetually connected city is a hurdle at current scenarios.

Security

Apart from security of data and information, there is also another aspect of security that we should consider. It’s the security of devices part of the IoT network. From sensors and embedded systems to cameras and other advanced gadgets, they need to be protected from theft and burglaries. Automatic alarms, self-destructing mechanisms, GPS-enabled devices and more should be exclusively manufactured for these purposes and then implemented.

All the challenges and hurdles we discussed previously can be tackled and fixed with more tech integration and implementation. This is one of the cases where the antidote to too much tech is more tech. But that’s how foundations of evolutions are laid.

So, let’s look at some of the most practical solutions to our challenges.

Key Role Of IoT In Smart Cities

Revolutionising the Collection of Data

Like we mentioned, data collection is at the basis of all things IoT. They are what enable devices and algorithms to make effective decisions. From a driverless car that knows when it should apply the brakes to smart water plants that know when to release adequate volumes of water, it is data that drives all decision-making processes.

That’s why we need to simplify data collection from users and devices through diverse mechanisms like automation such as form fills, predictive tools and more. Tools should also be deployed to learn if a similar system or module from multiple devices requires the same data set for processing. And if yes, steps should be taken to minimize duplicate data generation and enable data interoperability. Newer data should be generated and stored only when newer actions are taken. This will ensure optimal sustenance.

Revolutionising Communications for Accurate Service Deliveries

The data generated has to be put to good use for devices and systems to make wise decisions. And for that data transmission or communication has to happen seamlessly through the cloud. All service deliveries such as electricity measurement, traffic reports, automation systems, transportation facilities and more are data and communication-reliant. That’s why advanced embedded systems, circuitries and sensors should be designed with futuristic visions.

Managing Strain on Urban Resources

When urban areas are made smart with an ambitious vision, there would be several instances where natural and urban resources could be strained or compromised for a greater cause. Fortunately, however, that’s not the case with innovation as such resources can be utilized meaningfully and in fact even preserved through advanced tech implementations.

Connected Street Lights

Connected street lights or illumination are integral aspects of smart cities. These automated systems light up autonomously when natural light goes down and can even modify illumination intensities based on corresponding traffic or pedestrian activities. And when there’s no activity detected; they can go on standby mode as well.

This will ensure energy consumption is not only moderated but minimum as well. And when sufficient data is gathered, street lights can automatically detect patterns on busiest hours, dull hours, dim-light hours and more. They can also be fitted with emergency systems that can illuminate emergency lights to notify people of disasters for safe assembly points as well.

While smart cities are an amalgamation of diverse bubbles of ecosystems working both as standalone units and together, everything has to appear as one for a user or a citizen. All services, utilities and facilities must be streamlined into one for a holistic perspective of citizens. And only a smart city app can accomplish this.

With the help of the app, citizens can get an idea of available hotspots nearby, traffic details, government or public sector offices, charging pods, emergency services and more. Besides, these apps can also be portals for citizens to make payments for their electricity, fine, water bills, taxes, upload documents for compliances and more.

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is a rather generic term. It has a broad definition that can be interpreted and implemented according to diverse needs. But as far as smart cities are concerned, we need to identify individual aspects to better understand the complexities involved in setting up an entire city for the future.

From an IoT perspective, digital transformation involves the following entities:

Public Transport

A smart city would have a public transportation system that is on time every time. Why? Because the traffic systems are regulated by machines and are automated. And due to this, citizens can check out their next public transport details on their smart city app. Besides, they can also get their tickets and renew their passes from these portals and find details such as nearest car, bicycle or two-wheeler rentals nearby.

Connected cars will also be part of the ecosystem that will enable people to pool or share rides with those traveling on a similar route. On a more advanced level, supply-chain could be further optimized with accurate prediction of arrival of equipment and products. Smart parking spaces, contactless travel, advanced mobility and more can be easily brought in.

Waste Disposal

With this, citizens can have a better idea of how much waste they contribute to everyday. With this information, portals can suggest how they could minimize wastage and give suggestions on recycling, upcycling and waste disposal best practices.

Besides, smart cities can also locate nearest waste collection centre citizens can throw their waste in with adequate information on waste segregation. Gamification could be introduced for those who contribute to less waste disposal and more recycling with adequate rewards such as free rides for a week or something similar.

Water Management

One of the depleting non-renewable resources, water is our lifeline. And it is disheartening to note that water is being taken for a ride in several countries and places. With smart cities and IoT, water consumption can be minimized by automation and sensors. Detailed water consumption visualizations could help consumers know their water usage and compare that with their neighbours and neighbourhood trends. With proper information, we can empower people to take water conservation more seriously.

Energy Management

Similar concepts can be applied for energy consumption as well. Home automation systems are great at conserving electricity and fuel. They turn off devices like air conditioners, thermostats, lights, fans, televisions and more when no human presence is detected. And with data visualization features, conservation can be achieved here as well.

Traffic Management

Most traffic offences go unnoticed because adequate personnel is not deployed in several places. Only major areas in cities have airtight surveillance systems such as traffic police and cameras. But with smart cities, surveillance is everywhere. Thanks to this, traffic offences can be minimized by instant penalizing. Consequent charges can lead to suspension of licences as well.

Traffic signals are also automated in smart cities, allowing for better traffic control and management. Lane discipline can be achieved and ambulances can have special preferences (finally) as well.

Connected Living

A sense of belonging and ownership of concerns and challenges kicks in when everyone is connected together. Right now, the mindset is lethargy and the fact that somebody else would do the job for most people. But with smart city portals and apps, we would realize our role and responsibilities. And because we are publicly answerable, we would take things seriously as well. Connected living enables the emergence of a larger community as well.

Public Safety and Security Management

With airtight cameras, sensors and surveillance systems and backend technologies like social scoring systems, facial recognition modules and more, law and order can be optimized across all sectors of the city. There would be a sense of fear and respect for law as the GPS-enabled devices would immediately alarm police of wrongdoers and instantly send location details and even track them from escaping. People can feel safer and more secured in smart cities.

Smart Home Solutions

Smart home solutions are already commercially available and offer a glimpse of the future to those living under the rock. These bring in tons of benefits such as advanced lockers and safes through fingerprint and retinal detection technologies, better home security though layers of locking systems, surveillance cameras, sensors, automated home illumination systems, noise control features, remote activation and monitoring of home devices and more.

Digital Banking

A few aspects of digital banking are already in place in several countries. For a lot of us, it could have been weeks or months since we visited a bank in person. Most of our transactions and banking services are online. And in smart cities, banks will go completely digital as well.

And by digital, we mean digital branches. There wouldn’t be physical branches anywhere but only data centres for back-end operations. All manual processes will be digitized and people will never have to go to banks but only ATMs until they become redundant as well.

Drones

Drones have always been visualized as futuristic in movies and science-fiction novels. They are portrayed as spying gadgets in most pop-culture references. But in reality, they go beyond serving national interests. Commercially, drones are being planned to be used for the delivery of goods and products, for unmanned missions for meteorological purposes, aerial photography, real-estate supervision, rescue and search operations and more.

It wouldn’t be surprising if drones don’t become just another thing in our lives very soon. However, this will also bring in a lot of regulations and new laws that specify no-fly zones, special permits and more. There would also be distinctions between smart-city drones and commercial drones for leisure purposes.

Beacons

Beacons have one of the most specialized utilities. Beacons are tiny Bluetooth devices that transmit data to and from multiple connected devices. They are used to send and receive messages and for data exchanges. Because of this feature, beacons can be used for commercial and administrative purposes as well.

While retail stores can use beacons to attract customers and offer them personalized discounts, smart-city beacons can be used to stamp locations of citizens, help in GPS navigation, support driverless cars with updated data on pedestrian and traffic, detect and update public transportation for real-time updates on smart city apps, constructions and more.

Consumer Wearables and Biometrics

In smart cities, our wearable devices would be part of a larger connected ecosystem as well, exchanging data that has been approved by users for a myriad of purposes. Wearable devices that track our health can help in the notification of emergency situations in cases of heart attacks or strokes, automatically triggering an ambulance service to the citizen’s location. Once admitted, these devices can also update information on portals, which can further initiate insurance policies and procedures for cashless treatments.

While this is just one aspect of the benefits of consumer benefits, they can also have commercial and retail benefits as well.

When the entire city becomes futuristic and straight out of comic books, something more exciting should be rolled out to keep citizens captivated. That’s where virtual reality systems would come in entertainment and marketing aspects and further deliver immersive and personalized experiences. From advanced holograms to completely different virtual spaces and ambiences, people can live in their own sweet world like Ready Player One.

Blockchain is one of the rigid and fool-proof technologies out there that can’t simply be tampered with. No central authority or operation centre, blockchain is as democratic as it gets. And this is exactly what makes it powerful.

With blockchain, its implementation would be more on the finance side of smart city operations and management. Several financial processes such as fines, payments and taxes are automated in smart cities and to ensure these are all legitimate, blockchain has to come into the picture.

Let’s look at some instances of application:

Trade Finance

Trading is volatile and prone to several vulnerabilities. With blockchain, all vulnerabilities can be addressed and fixed, making it easier for online traders to execute safer trades, deposit and withdraw money and more.

Know Your Customer

Because everything is digital, chances of duplication or fraudulent documents doing the rounds could increase exponentially. But these can be kept under check with blockchain and its KYC features. With smart contracts and document detection tools, genuine customers and citizens can be verified and approved. And every citizen would have only one unique identification pin which has to be integrated with every utility or service, completely eliminating fake profiles and citizens out of the picture.

Verified accounts and verified transactions.

Smart Margin Calls

Margin calls arise when the margin account of an investor falls below that the required amount of a broker. This in turn gives rise to the need for additional securities or capital to up the maintenance margin. With blockchain and the implementation of transaction value logic, instant margin calls can be achieved by minimizing the time spent on disputes, back and forth communications and more. Credit and liquidity risks can also be avoided because there won’t be any manual work involved in collateral exchanges. This assists in the overall process becoming less expensive, less time consuming and less risky.

Mortgage Lending

Like we discussed in our previous chapter, mortgage lending is a time-consuming process with never-ending paperwork, documentation, verification and checks. But with blockchain, these processes could be shortened with automation and advanced hyper ledgers, allowing firms to simplify lending processes and buyers to get real-time information about their mortgage application statuses.

Insurance Claims Processing

Similar to mortgage lending, the insurance claims process is yet another cumbersome process that requires documents, stakeholder authorizations, protocols, verifications and more. Ironically, insurance claims are also supposed to be life-savers to consumers. With blockchain, instantaneous processing of insurance claims with digital verifications, DIY mechanisms and process automations.

Global Payments

There are a lot of restrictions and regulations involved when a business or a customer has to send money to a different country. Setting up new accounts, getting bank authorizations, upgrading cards and more prevent seamless transactions from happening. Again, blockchain can interfere and make way for peer-to-peer transactions with zero transaction charges and complete security.

Smart cities exist because artificial intelligence exists. And we all know machine learning is an integral part or a subset of artificial intelligence. When it comes to a large-scale overhaul of cities, a different cadre of machine learning systems have to be deployed. Let’s look at some of the aspects.

Natural Language Processing

From manually changing television channels by stepping near a television to using a remote control and now commanding the device to change channels, we have come a really long way. And this is what natural language processing is all about — the ability of devices to understand human language, speech, tone, modulation and voice to take appropriate actions as dictated by users.

In smart cities, natural language processing will play a crucial role in bringing in added convenience to citizens by letting them operate their devices without even touching them. Dictation in connected cars is a simple example of this concept in action. Speech recognition can also be used to search and list queries of places, restaurants and charging stations nearby and more.

Robotic Process Automation

RPAs are the robots we’ve always wanted but not aesthetically the way we envisioned them to be. They are not the typical robots in movies but complex equipment and algorithms that help us execute a myriad of actions. With RPA, smart cities can assist citizens in getting answers to their questions by interacting with chatbots, automating document forwarding in lending processes, conducting background verification through calls and digital verifications and more.

RPAs also combine with predictive tools to notify when a system might malfunction, trigger appropriate service requests, make payments, reconcile payments, book appointments and do anything manual intervention is required.

Robotic advisors could also help us make better financial decisions, assist in waste, water and energy management and more.

Cognitive Machine Learning

The dynamics in smart cities are bound to shift, evolve, diversify, change and influence with the passage of time. With these changes, what also change are data sets, their processing techniques, inferences, insights, algorithms, parameters and ultimately decision-making. And for systems to have ultimate efficiency, what is inevitable is cognitive machine learning.

In simple words, cognitive machine learning is the convergence of IoT, Big Data, machine learning and other allied technologies. IBM came up with the term cognitive computing to describe mechanisms or systems that can perform evolutionary actions by learning from multiple data sets, have reasoning capabilities, interact with humans and other machines, gain experiences from their instances and more. Cognitive systems are what are needed in smart cities to keep up with the ever-changing landscapes and dynamics.

Data Science

Data science is the processing of generated data for the detection of patterns, anomalies and insights to help machines make better and informed decisions. Data science helps systems understand what is right and what is wrong and consistently makes them learn. Data science is at the heart of all activities in a smart city and has three refined purposes:

• Descriptive — to give an idea of what’s happening in a module or system
• Predictive — to predict the future of a system or a scenario and precisely tell occurrence
• Prescriptive — to suggest corrective measures to activities happening currently

Data science ensures artificial intelligence is consistently optimized with the most up-to-date and precise data.

Case Study

The Best Smart Cities In The World

Jakarta

The capital of a small island nation, Jakarta has surprised the world with its progressive thoughts and futuristic goals. Recently, Jakarta replaced its conventional mercury-vapor street lights with smart lights. Close to 90,000 lights were replaced in a span of seven months, paving the way for minimized energy consumption, better staffing and illumination.

Besides, it also launched its smart city program by launching an app for its citizens to report crimes, fire outbreaks, waste disposal along with the ability to retrieve information on the city.

Barcelona

Understanding the fact that most traffic is generated by cars looking for parking spaces, Barcelona came up with a smart solution to tackle this concern. With connected devices, sensors and apps, it ensured information on parking spaces nearby was available in real-time. The city even automated payments to avoid delays and optimize pipeline. This had a butterfly effect as it led to a more fluid traffic and reduced levels of noise pollution as well.

Amsterdam

Another unique and brilliant innovation comes from Amsterdam with its Sunlit Road project. After studying the fact that a cycling lane witnesses around 2000 cyclists a day, the officials decided to make good use of this statistic by deciding to generate energy out of it. Yes, these roads are solar roads and the energy from them can power a couple of homes seamlessly.

Wrapping Up

So, this was a really interesting post, right? Reassuring and intriguing at the same time.

The future does look promising but the future never unfolded without efforts in the present. That’s why we urge you to explore the IoT space for your real estate business and venture into massive operations and undertakings of projects.

Get in touch with us to get exclusive IoT systems built for your purposes and arrive as a pioneer in smart city development. Discuss your idea with us today and have technology fix your concern and help you grow big.

Reach out now.

Originally published at https://www.xbytesolutions.com.