Are smart cities our future? Or, are they a reality today?

It depends on where you’re looking.

For example, Amsterdam has been working on its smart city initiative since 2009. The goal of the initiative is to reduce carbon emissions by 40% by 2025, and they are on the right track. Or, take a look at Barcelona – it currently has over 20.000 sensors picking up information about temperature, air quality and mobility.

Piacenza Laboratorio Aperto and sustainable mobility

Speaking of mobility, we wanted to share our latest case study. The story of how Piacenza Laboratorio Aperto has used our platform to create a complete smart city project.

The aim of this project was to strengthen sustainability in monitoring mobility systems and the city’s territory, as a whole, while providing new applications that adequately enhance these processes.

Like the European Commission says “A smart city goes beyond the use of digital technologies for better resource use and less emissions. It means smarter urban transport networks, upgraded water supplies and waste disposal facilities, and more efficient ways to light and heat buildings.” This kind of a cohesive approach is exactly what we were aiming for in this project with  Piacenza Laboratorio Aperto.

Figure 1. Smart city. Logistic demonstrator.

The Zerynth-powered solution

The solution consists of a platform and a demonstrator, with interactive Totems equipped with Zerynth‘s IoT devices (4ZeroBox).

But, let’s take a closer look at how these totems work.

They act as environmental, proximity, and movement sensors that are connected to an electronic board equipped with WiFi and GSM connections. The data that the totems extract is displayed in user-friendly views on multi-touch monitors. Furthermore, the monitors display the best means of transport to use at that specific time starting from one point to another in the city.