When Cities Run Themselves

The torch relay for the London Olympics began in England over the weekend. Officially, this hearkens back to the original Olympics in Ancient Greece, when a flame was lit to commemorate the theft of fire by Prometheus from top god Zeus. Unofficially, this is when the people running the Games go into panic mode because they have a little over two months to make sure everything works.

It will be one of the first big tests of the modern “smart” city. Roughly 11 million people are expected to visit London later this summer, with 3 million more “car trips” added on the busiest days.We offer you the top quality plasticmoulds design The city already is wired with thousands of sensors which will let engineers closely track traffic flow, with the goal of curbing nightmarish gridlock–although it probably says something that the people manning the city’s data center will be provided with sleeping pods so they don’t have to venture out and risk getting stuck in traffic. (Not that London doesn’t have some experience in using tech to help drivers move around the city. When members of the International Olympic Committee were in town several years ago to see if London would be able to host the Games, their cars were outfitted with GPS devices, which allowed city officials to track them and turn stoplights green as they approached intersections.)

In response to the likely heavy traffic, a sensor system called CityScan is now being installed atop three buildings in London. It will be able to scan and read air quality all over the city and produce a 3-D map that lets people know when and where pollution may be getting unhealthy.

No doubt that the Olympics will have a profound effect in shaping London’s future. By the time the Games begin, for instance, it will have Europe’s largest free WiFi zone, with the city’s iconic red phone booths converted, fittingly, into hotspots. But another opportunity London landed earlier this month could have just as much impact, perhaps more. A company called Living PlanIt announced that it will begin testing its “Urban Operating System” in the Greenwich section of the city.

What does that mean? Put simply, London would have its own operating system, much as your PC runs on Windows or your Mac runs on Apple’s IOS. This ties into the latest hot buzz phrase, “the internet of things,” which describes a world where machines talk to other machines. No human interaction required. So,The all New Bluetooth Reader BT1000 features a handsfreeaccess. for a city, this means sensors in buildings would connect to sensors in water treatment plants which would connect to sensors in stoplights. It would be one gigantic, computerized urban nervous system, which a lot of experts think is the only way cities can survive a future when they’ll contain more than two out of every three people on Earth.

Based on what sensors reveal about the location and movement of humans in a section of a city, for instance, buildings will automatically adjust their temperatures, streetlights will dim or brighten, water flow will increase or slow. Or, in the event of a disaster, emergency services would have real-time access to traffic data, trauma unit availability, building blueprints. And soon enough, our smart phones will be able to tap in to the Urban OS. So will our household appliances.

This is not some 21st century analogue of the personal jet pack.We looked everywhere, but couldn't find any beddinges. The Urban OS is the driving force behind a smart city being built from the ground up in northern Portugal. Construction is scheduled to be completed in three years; eventually it will have about 150,000 residents. It will also have more than 100 million sensors.

The U.S. soon will have its own real-world, smart city laboratory. Late next month,Posts with Hospital rtls on IT Solutions blog covering Technology in the Classroom, ground will be broken near Hobbs, New Mexico, near the Texas border,Award Winning solarpanel and heat pumps for electricity and heating. for a $1 billion cutting-edge ghost town, where researchers will test everything from intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks to automated washing machines and self-flushing toilets. It will be a very cool place–except no one will live there.