Tweet

May 2018
AutomatedBuildings.com

[an error occurred while processing this directive]
(Click Message to Learn More)


Transcendental Coalescence: In the Age of IoT and Analytics

A Smart City View

Subrrata Bhattacharya
Subrata Bhattacharya
Managing Director Johnson Controls
India Engineering Center

subrata_bhattacharya@hotmail.com

Ankur Thareja Ankur Thareja
Group Head & Senior General Manager, Data-Enabled Business, and Advanced Product Research
Johnson Controls
India Engineering Center

ankurthareja@gmail.com

Articles
Interviews
Releases
New Products
Reviews
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Editorial
Events
Sponsors
Site Search
Newsletters
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Archives
Past Issues
Home
Editors
eDucation
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Training
Links
Software
Subscribe
[an error occurred while processing this directive]

In our previous article “How IoT and Big Data are transforming Green Buildings into Living Buildings” we talked about

In this article, we would like to project this concept to the more generic business environment (A Smart City) and reflect on

Before we start deliberating on this topic lets first qualify some definitions:

Smart City use case of “Transcendental Coalescence”

The United Nations estimates that between 2015 and 2050 the world population will increase by 32%, i.e., From 7.2 to 9.7 billion inhabitants, while the urban population will increase by 63% from 3.9 to 6.3 billion inhabitants. This extraordinary growth in urbanization is already putting and will continue to put a great amount of stress on cities in providing basic services to citizens. We will need cities and megacities, thus spurring the need for more housing, offices, hospitals, and schools along with connected and efficient public infrastructure & amenities.

Both, Rapid urbanization and unplanned growth pose significant challenges for cities by way of increase in demand for natural resources. Currently, even though the world’s cities occupy just 2% of the earth’s land, they account for up to 80% of energy consumption and 75% of carbon dioxide emissions. Hence, we need to find smart ways to use our natural resources better and better serve the aspirations of the urban population so that cities grow sustainably.

The word ‘Smart’ by itself is subject to interpretation, and there are multiple definitions of Smart cities that exist in public domain. A smart city is beyond the aggregation of smart buildings. One of the most appropriate definitions states “A smart city uses information and communication technology (ICT) to enhance its livability, workability, and sustainability” [Smart cities council 2014]

The aim of a smart city is to unify all the elements and make them work together towards the betterment of its citizens via Transcendental Coalescence. This is achieved by a conglomeration of multiple use cases in action across its citizen diaspora; in a bid to increase productivity, safety, and security while creating an experience of sustainable urban living.

Figure1

Figure-1: Smart city ecosystem

As explained in figure 1, there are multiple systems and subsystems in a smart city eco-system namely

—    Waste the disposal and management
—    Traffic management, transport systems, and clean vehicle with associated infrastructure
—    Water Management
—    Clean Power & Energy Management
—    Physical security, cybersecurity, and surveillance and an overall threat modeling of a city
—    E-governance (Transport, Utilities, Healthcare, Safety & Security), etc.
—    Others

Each of these aspects is an area of specialization applied to the building, precincts, municipality and finally to the city level. Thanks to the continuous evolution of technology, there is a set of the common underlying theme from a design perspective that helps make the ‘Smart city’ from concept to reality.

The first step towards the design is the rigorous and meticulous definition of personas and their use cases. The problem statement and/or use cases need to be identified, and solutions need to be crafted accordingly; keeping scalability in mind too. Technology helps to bring the solutions together, but solutions cannot be fitted to a problem. The design consideration of retrofitting Singapore as a smart city vis-à-vis Jaipur (a proposed smart city in India) are very different.  Some of the examples are

Selection of technology elements while building the smart city ecosystem and/or its components is critical. A smart city will be dealing with a very large amount of data (in petabytes) that could be structured, or text records of human & machine or video surveillance feeds or even social media feeds. All this data is interdependent and needs to be connected and interpreted in the right context for pro-active and meaningful action. Knowledge of technology components, the data flow understanding, and allied analytics is a common lever across the systems and subsystems. Further appreciation for ‘obsolescence,’ be it electronic hardware or software components in the ever-demanding need of citizens is necessary to ensure there is a right trade-off between “future proofing” and “implementation success.”

Technology components for Transcendental Coalescence

Let’s look at few of these technology components. Complete Transcendental Coalescence will require an ecosystem consisting of three main technology components:

Figure 2

Figure-2: Unified Reference Architecture for Transcendental Coalescence


Let’s discuss each enabler in detail

1)     Data Collection: This can be subdivided into
Optimized data transfer protocols like RESTful API, CoAP, HTTP(s), AMQP, MQTT play a major role here. While the smart edge devices in the network are expected to use these, in most cases gateway plays an important role in converting data into IoT defined protocols. Gateway works as a bridge between the non-IP legacy systems or non-IoT traditional systems and protocols with lightweight cloud services protocols for onward processing /analysis of data.

Further, the data is not necessarily a real-time or a time series data in nature. There are and could be contextual or unstructured data feed as well, e.g. asset maintenance history records, social media content, etc. to be used as part of the system.
Edge application services significantly decrease the volumes of data that must be moved, the consequent traffic, and the distance the data must travel, thereby reducing transmission costs, shrinking latency, and improving quality of service (QoS). It is always desired to have as many as edge devices/ intelligence on the edge while designing a smart city subsystem and its components.

2)    Cloud, data platform & analytics

The success of data strategy and various systems interconnectivity/interoperability depends on the data platform. While there is a generic guideline, mostly it depends on the software architecture of the data platform of the provider. The generic checkpoints remain

-    Data type compatibility ( Data Ingestion methodology and support): Time series events, unstructured text, image, video streams, pdf or scanned documents
-    Distributed architecture having microservices implementation for autonomously distributed computing at the edge level
-    Big Data storage and processing system, e.g. a Hadoop file system

On the analytics side, the data platform should have the capability to

-    Rule ( mathematical expressions based on if, then else and simple equations) based analytic decision approach
-    Ability to carry out statistical analysis
-    Perform (reinforced/deep) learning. Based on statistical data, the system by itself recognizes the pattern based on historical data and takes appropriate action automatically (AI)
-    Able to manages complicated workflows

3)    Mobility, Apps, and Visualization

Until recently, every business problem was looked upon as technology and cost-saving problem. End-user and his needs and experience were mostly neglected. Technologies and use case approach need to bring up the experience for the personas in the ecosystem. The user interface for the citizen with the smart city needs to be

  1. Engaging: Social, creative and collaborative
  2. Empowering:Providing a choice and flexibility; a sense of control
  3. The sense of fulfillment: This is directly related to a happy citizen and hence a happy city

Figure 3 

Figure-3:  Three typical categories of mobility & apps.

Challenges in developing Transcendental Coalesce (Smart City use case):

1.    The need for an integrated approach

A city is made up of different infrastructure verticals forming a system of systems. However, such city infrastructure elements typically operate in silos. Smart cities need an integrated approach in order to harness the full potential of smart infrastructure. Integrated approaches are effective tools for capturing the dynamic relations between people, policies, and environments. Some of the recent examples made in this direction

[an error occurred while processing this directive]All the above are individually planned projects. More insights and increase in overall efficiencies can be obtained by combining them and correlating data. For example:

2.    Monetization Strategy: Infrastructure ownership and use

The integrated approach leads to other challenges being faced in the absence of universal accepted Cloud /Data connectivity architecture. At the pace with which new technologies and protocols are being designed and proposed for connectivity, there is an absence of standardization for diverse system connectivity.

The initial cost of IoT is one of the hindrances; Current business models do not provide a mass proliferation of technologies. As the market matures cost, legal, sharing infrastructure business models will evolve to justify first cost and have a pull-through market.

3.    Cybersecurity and privacy

While leveraging technology brings many benefits, it also creates significant exposure to security and privacy vulnerabilities which one need to be appraised of and strategy defined for mitigation.

As Sudhi Sinha (VP - Data Enabled Business, Johnson Controls) rightly pointed in his book “Building an Effective IoT Ecosystem for Your Business”; below are the must-have considerations while creating the cybersecurity strategy

—    Understanding the threat vectors in the world of IoT; the path was taken in the IoT world to penetrate your device.
—    Recognizing data privacy and ownership concerns
—    Learning about the various industry standards and available resources
—    Understanding popular and modern technologies and standards
—    Designing security policies and practices
—    Securing data and insights
—    Building risk management and compliance program
—    Hacking and auditing security and privacy effectiveness
—    Managing attacks and communicating effectively

4.    Lack of a smart city visionary and citizen partnerships

Finally, every challenge brings new opportunity. The challenge to deliver the experience of an urban quality life, brings a huge opportunity for Cloud, IoT, Mobility & Apps and IT & Data security industry.

Figure 4 

Figure-4:  Smart City Market Size

Businesses need to be proactive in adopting new technologies, innovate, make new products and put into action to address the use cases.

It is not important to have interest in the Smart city; it is critical to have a commitment towards it!!!

Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this paper are strictly of the author and does not necessarily represent the view of Johnson Controls.

References

  1. Building an Effective IoT Ecosystem for Your Business” by Sudhi Sinha, Youngchoon Park -  Data enabled business, Johnson Controls
  2. Workplace powered by Human experience – Research paper by JLL
  3. How we design and build a smart city and nation | Cheong Koon Hean | TEDxSingapore
  4. Discovering the True Value of City Data Experts  https://datasmart.ash.harvard.edu/news/article/discovering-the-true-value-of-data-experts-who-are-showing-cities-the-money


About the Authors
Subrata Bhattacharya is Managing Director -Johnson Controls (India Engineering Center).  A business leader with 20 years of experience in Building automation and controls industry across building verticals. Worked and led teams/businesses across the spectrum of new construction, building retrofit, service, performance contracting, remote monitoring/ fault diagnostics, products, and solution development.
He is a key patron for implementation of the cloud and IoT strategy of Johnson Controls

Ankur Thareja is Sr. General Manager & Group Head- Data Enabled Business and Advanced Product Research with Johnson Controls- India Engineering Center. He has a career graph spanning over 17 years in Building Controls, Energy Solutions, and Connected Services (Hadoop and Azure-based solutions) .  He is a big proponent of IoT, Big Data, and Cloud-based solutions.
He is Certified Energy Auditor (CEA) from Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE), Certified Measurement and Verification Professional (CMVP) by Efficiency Valuation Organization (EVO) and an Accredited Professional from Indian Green Building Congress (IGBC).                                                                                                                             

footer


[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[Click Banner To Learn More]

[Home Page]  [The Automator]  [About]  [Subscribe ]  [Contact Us]

Events

Want Ads

Our Sponsors

Resources