Smart Cities Today we can!According to projections, nearly 70% of the world population will live in urban areas by 2050. While some megacities are already struggling to cope with the current inflow of people, we need to create smart cities in order to make these urban areas more liveable and truly sustainable. What is the definition of a smart city? What are the benefits and challenges? And finally, what are the smart solutions to urbanization? |  |
 Smart buildingsThe optimisation of services like heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), as well as energy usage and efficiency, is crucial. Building-integrated photovoltaics are a great solution of smart building management. |  Smart mobilityPromoting electric vehicles, self-service bikes, public transport and carpooling networks, as well as providing charging stations must be a priority, to give city dwellers true sustainable alternatives to the single-occupant fossil fuelled car. |  Smart lightingLighting optimization aims at reducing energy usage of the lighting systems, by providing the correct amount of light at the correct time with efficient fixtures. Intelligent and weather adaptive streetlights are a good example of smart lighting systems. |  Smart roadsControl sensors can be used to monitor certain traffic patterns and common traffic jams. Besides, smart technologies can detect the possible deterioration of equipment such as traffic lights and light panels for pedestrians, or the effect of traffic on the environment. |
Key Techniques Optimize
Smart Services A lt hough such cit ies feat ure dif ferent smar t applications, the purpose of every application is to increase the convenience and comfort of all citizens and enterprises in the city. Ken asserted that the sensor, network, and application layers of the IoT can completely support all industries in a Smart City; however, many techniques are still required to achieve the final goals of comprehensive sensing, reliable transmission, and intelligent computing. For the lowest layer, compact batteries are crucial for front-end sensing devices. Long-life batteries are required to power mobile nursing carts for example.
Regarding the interconnected second layer, Ken commented that, “Wireless transmission has entered the high-speed 4G and 5G generations. However, certain applications cannot tolerate connection interrupts of even 1%; thus to achieve 100% accuracy, a stable and reliable network system is necessary for Smart City applications. Regarding processing in the top layer of the IoT, Ken stated that, “As each industry introduces various innovative, smart applications one by one, the big data sets accumulated will facilitate further discovery.”
Case:
Background Information
The smart city concept has become ubiquitous worldwide. In China, recent economic growth and more open policies have led to rapidly increasing levels of urbanization. At the end of 2017, approximately 60% of the total population resided in urban areas, a dramatic increase from the 20% estimated in 1978. Unsurprisingly, this mass urbanization has led to numerous problems in terms of transport, economic stability, social security, energy consumption, and the environment. To address these challenges, Beijing city officials needed an intelligent IoT solution for conducting real-time monitoring of local conditions, such as air quality, road traffic, and video surveillance data. The collected big data would be then used for subsequent analysis to provide actionable feedback and insights for optimizing the city’s smart capabilities.
System Requirements
The smart city transformation impacts every aspect of the city infrastructure. In Beijing, because temperatures can reach up to 40 °C (104 °F) in the summer and drop to -15 °C in the winter, the entire IoT solution - including edge sensing devices, edge computers, network routers, gateways, and back-end servers - must be rugged enough to withstand extreme environments. Therefore, a wide operating temperature range, zero downtime, and high stability were essential hardware requirements. And because accurate data is crucial for smart city applications, the solution also needed multiple open I/O interface types to enable diverse data to be collected and seamlessly integrated for management and analysis. Additionally, in order to transform the data into actionable insights, a powerful GPU server with deep-learning capabilities was also required. Finally, prior to implementation, the entire solution needed to be tested and adjusted to meet specific application requirements.
System Description
Advantech provided a comprehensive IoT solution for an integrated city environment monitoring system, which included its BB-SL306 wireless router, EKI-1522I serial device server, ARK-1124U edge computer, EKI-7428G industrial GbE switch, and SKY-6200 high-performance GPU server. The SKY-6200 server enables all recorded video and environment data, such as humidity, temperature, and PM2.5 levels, to be uploaded to edge computers for instant inference and analysis. Using intelligent connectivity, the data is also transferred to a deep learning GPU server for integrating big data and optimizing device productivity and intelligence. Although SKY-6200 is a 2U high-density server that supports up to 4 x GPU cards, for this project, only one Tesla P4 card and one Quadro M4000 GPU card were installed to facilitate machine learning and video processing. The SKY-6200 server also offers dual Xeon E5-2600 V3/V4 sockets, 8 x memory DIMMs, 6 x PCI Express expansion slots, 8 x hot-swappable SATA bays, and 4 x LAN ports, as well as industrial-grade vibration tolerance for enhanced reliability. Moreover, the inclusion of an 1800W 80Plus Platinum redundant power supply provided the solid power efficiency needed to support multiple high-wattage GPU cards.
Key Features
Why Advantech
Advantech is a leading brand in China that continues to dominate the industrial solutions market by offering high-quality products and technical expertise. Advantech’s IoT solution was selected not only because the SKY-6200 specifications met the project requirements, but also because Advantech’s wide range of products for edge sensing, computing, connectivity, and server storage provided a comprehensive IoT solution architecture. The provision of an-all-in-one solution reduced the systems integration time, enabling the customer to focus on application development and implementation.
