Porto: Smart Urban Utility
Porto is trying to solve its traffic congestion by taking a vehicular inter-networking approach.
The city is now a Living Lab for Intelligent Transport Systems Research. In addition to the 500 nodes in their vehicle ad hoc network (taxis in the DRIVE-IN project), the NDrive navigation system which is commercialised internationally is also tested in the city.
One experiment captured data via the DRIVE-IN infrastructure during an Academic Festival in Porto on 4th May, 2011.
Taxi Traffic
The taxi traffic was monitored from the hours of midnight until 7.00am – up to a 60% gain in traffic management flows could be achieved during this trial. Apart from being time-stamped, all data is collected anonymously and the corresponding databases were approved by the National Data Protection Authority.
Porto’s ‘Smart Urban Mobility’ research is also assessing the impact of ‘informed navigation’. When each car contains a GPS-enabled smartphone, for example, will people be able to use such an application to avoid traffic jams? Other potential impacts include virtual traffic lights, social networking and taxi-sharing, and projecting digital content onto car windscreens.
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Porto: PlanIT
Living PlanIT is an international business that develops novel sustainable city-scale technologies. Steve Lewis, the company’s founder and CEO, says that while urbanisation is growing at a fast rate, there is low penetration of technology in the construction industry.
Living PlanIT has three core markets: New City, Urban Regeneration, and Retrofit. They are currently building a new city in Portugal (PlanIT Valley) close to Porto, and will soon begin retrofitting Silicon Valley, where they will coordinate all transport systems. They also have regeneration projects in London and Seoul.
Living PlanIT embeds sensing and actuation technology into building materials when developments are being constructed and applies IT system design approach to construction developments.
Urban Operating System
The Network can then talk directly to these sensors via an Urban Operating System (UOS). All sensing operations are distributed, and hence there is no central CO2-producing system.
Every building constructed expands computer capacity. The gathered data is used to create services for the building occupants – a robust privacy policy monitors this data collection.
2,875 partners are involved with Living PlanIT, including Microsoft and Cisco, with nearly 5,000 direct jobs to be created during the first phase of their Portuguese PlanIT Valley project.
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France: SEANET
Click here to see details on SEANET’s Overall Scope, R&D Scope, Expected Impact and Involved Constituency
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