City CIOs debate the merits of the IoT-powered smart city platform- Valutrics

World’s largest smart city platform

The platform San Diego will deploy this year uses Current, an energy savings company that describes itself as a “first-of-its kind startup within the walls of GE,” to modernize and sensorize city streetlights. Current will upgrade 14,000 streetlights with LED fixtures, which will reduce energy costs by an estimated $2.4 million a year, and it will install 3,200 “CityIQ” sensor nodes — equipped with optical, audio and other sensors — to collect data on the environment, weather and traffic.

Behind the scenes, the platform will be powered by technology from Pivotal and GE’s Predix platform, chips from Intel, and network connectivity from ATT. In fact, San Diego is one of the first cities to take advantage of an exclusive agreement between GE and ATT to bring IoT sensors and connectivity to cities across the U.S. and Mexico.

The foundation for the newly announced IoT platform began two years ago when San Diego upgraded 3,200 streetlights with adaptive LED fixtures and wireless connectivity. The enhancements enabled the city to remotely control the brightness of the lights, and, subsequently, to create a wireless local area network or a mesh network.

David Graham

GE approached the city with a new idea: With the beginnings of a mesh network already in place, why not add additional sensors to collect other kinds of IoT data that could be used to generate new apps and pin down inefficiencies for the city? The proposal aligned with the city’s thinking. “We’ve seen for far too long that one-off investments in technology provide benefits for a single use case, but with the advancements in software that we’ve seen, if you build the hardware correctly, there’s no telling what you can do,” Graham said.

Last summer, the city launched a pilot with 40 CityIQ nodes, and it began to see how sensor data could spark civic innovation. At a hackathon with the University of California at San Diego, a group of students came up with the idea of developing a food truck app for food operators to target places where people were congregating — on the fly. “There’s so much that can be done,” Graham said.

The sensor data will eventually feed into the city’s open data portal and, through APIs, will be made available to the public. “Right now, we’re in the early stages of determining what data and data streams will be pushed out via our open data portal,” Graham said. “But in San Diego, our default is open — open with people, open with our data.”

The upgrade to streetlights is set to begin this summer, and Graham is already talking about the possibility of installing another 3,000 CityIQ sensors before the end of the year. “We see this platform as unleashing the imagination of our software developers in San Diego and also the imagination of our city employees to provide better service to the public,” he said.