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Smart connectivity applications in the public sector are enormous. Mobilizing comparatively modest budgets, IoT provides immediate returns in key domains such as facility management, smart transportation, smart parking, street lighting or water management. Municipalities report savings over 10% for public garden watering, over 20% for heating costs for schools, and similar figures for waste collection and many other use cases.
Actility provides a unique LPWAN platform for the public sector, using IoT to enable new services. Building on a dedicated long-range low-power network for IoT, local governments and city authorities can connect a countless battery powered « things » into a single network, enabling data collection from parking sensors, environmental monitoring equipment, flood detection sensors or smart meters. The data is then fed to centralized intelligent systems which can make recommendations to optimize city service management.
IoT also has a positive impact on quality of life, through better functioning, cleaner and better maintained infrastructure but also indoor air quality control for offices and schools. Healthcare systems can be improved by optimization of hospital logistics, leveraging in-home patient care, improved elderly assistance or automated instant contact back-tracing to better fight epidemics. Local governments are empowered to act preventively, e.g. by early action of police in noisy areas before riots happen, or public policies that mandate tracking of shared scooter systems and enforce parking in predefined areas.
IoT technologies contribute to increased safety and security. Structural monitoring detects problems with buildings or bridges before they cause casualties and verify that new constructions and tunnels do not impact existing buildings. Connected fire/gas sensors improve the response time of firefighters and connected fire hydrants make sure they will find a functional water supply. Road temperature monitoring optimizes de-icing operations. Manhole surveillance prevents thefts and intrusions into the sewer system. Online water quality monitoring detects and stops chemical terrorist attacks. Electronic ID badges monitor kids as they go out for school activities. In India emergency call buttons have been used as part of women protection policy. Even armed forces use IoT geolocation systems to localize lost weapons or equipment, secure soldiers during guard tours and prevent intrusions in airports or military bases.
LoRaWAN® fits most low-power and indoor/campus use cases, while LTE-M and NB-IoT may be required for more demanding applications. Our ThingPark platform coordinates all network technologies and provides multi-tenant private network management and full-MVNE capabilities which allow public authorities to fully control their system, delegate management to local agencies as needed, eliminate silos and minimize dependence to 3rd parties.
Although public services and waste management companies have been around for a long time, they have seen only limited innovation with operational efficiency – until now. With the Internet of Things, you can integrate even the simplest waste bins into an intelligent waste management system with smart LoRaWAN™ sensors, allowing for the optimization of collection routes, to save time and money while ensuring a clean environment.
CHALLENGE
Trash containers can often fill up too soon, and most of the time there is no real-time information on waste bins filling level. Waste is typically collected on fixed schedule, while the pick-up routes are not adapted to the actual level of waste in dumpsters. Same routes are always used, which is leading to inefficient waste management in a city, and also unnecessary CO2 emissions and traffic complications.
SOLUTION
Low-power connected ultrasonic sensors are placed in the bins, the connectivity being managed by Actility’s high-performant LoRaWAN™ network management server. The sensors measure the level of waste and notify the waste management company whether the container is at full capacity or when it needs to be emptied. The sensors also provide valuable data about dumpster usage, emptying cycles and more.
BENEFITS
Private waste management services and municipalities can offer better comfort to citizens by connecting the dumpsters. It allows the sanitation specialists to work more efficiently and cut unnecessary costs up to 50% by optimizing refuse collection routes in real-time, avoiding overflows and planning ahead future routes. Cities can better analyze the citizen behavior patterns and install the bins at the best locations.
Parking is becoming an expensive resource in almost any major city in the world. City authorities struggle to provide convenient parking service, and sometimes they have to close streets, re-route traffic and notify the public about roadworks, disrupting traffic and parking patterns. Using smart parking sensors with LoRaWAN™ and well-connected control systems allow drivers to easily find free parking spots, avoid congestion and reduce fuel consumption and pollution. And this IoT solution can be implemented with a fast infrastructure setup without transforming the entire city into a construction site.
CHALLENGE
A city’s parking management system is often under pressure of high and unstable demand from users. In order to offer an efficient parking service to its citizens, the city must fully exploit all available spaces, and therefore to connect them with IoT to monitor and optimize the occupancy of parking spaces in cities. How the city can achieve a smart system to gather, analyze and use data from hundreds of parking spaces?
SOLUTION
LoRa-enabled parking sensors can be deployed throughout urban areas, enabling parking operators to capture and analyze occupancy data in real-time. Connected road signs and online applications can display information about available parking spots. Actility provides the ideal IoT connectivity platform for cities, public and private parking operators.
BENEFITS
Smart Parking IoT solution allows cities, parking operators and private companies to monitor and manage parking spaces, enhancing usage and traffic flow, and consequently generating incremental revenues. Also, parking providers can adapt their pricing strategies in line with real-world usage patterns.
Reduce costs and make the city safer with intelligent lighting, powered by Actility’s LoRaWAN™ technology. Install IoT-enabled light intensity sensors to remotely control light intensity for energy savings. Monitor and maintain street lighting networks to ensure city efficiency and sustainability, without compromising the safety of streets for pedestrians and drivers.
CHALLENGE
Currently, in most cities there is no real-time monitoring of street light condition, therefore manual inspection is required, and it’s not possible to change and customize the lighting level depending on daylight intensity. That involves energy inefficiency and higher operating costs.
SOLUTION
Actility provides the ideal IoT connectivity platform for cities to drastically reduce their electricity costs, using connected lamps, equipped with LoRaWAN™ sensors to determine in real time the traffic of vehicles and passers-by on an artery and adapt the lighting accordingly.
BENEFITS
Smart cities leverage connected lights to reduce their energy footprint and cut down on maintenance costs. Lighting operators can deploy workers only when necessary instead of carrying out routine maintenance checks, and to plan maintenance operations by detecting overheating, power supply shortage and broken bulbs.
Cities are the centers of consumption of energy, materials, thus having a high environmental impact from greenhouse gas production, waste, and emissions of pollutants in water and air. To improve peoples lives, cities now use IoT for air quality monitoring, water quality monitoring, ambient noise level monitoring, and flood detection. By implementing a network of LoRaWAN™ sensors and gateways across urban regions, environmental indicators can be measured in real-time, detecting issues before they become crises.
CHALLENGES
Air pollutants (CO2, PM, ozone, nitrogen dioxide) pose serious health and environment risks. Noise pollution has harmful effects on citizens health. Urban water resources like rivers, lakes and swimming pools present safety issues. Irrigation is cities is mostly inefficient. Flood risk: water level of rivers and canals must be monitored to have early warnings in case of flooding.
SOLUTIONS
IoT sensors monitor a range of environmental factors such as air quality (Co2, dust, sound, temperature, radiation), soil humidity, water quality, flood detection and more, while LoRaWAN™ allows monitoring even in remote areas with years of battery life for sensors. Actility provides the ideal IoT connectivity platform for cities and municipalities.
BENEFITS
Deploying environmental IoT sensors helps to track the evolution of the environment in the city remotely and in real-time, to forecast and take actions to reduce air, water, and noise pollution and prevent flooding. Citizens can receive precise information about air pollution. Irrigation in public spaces is optimized, saving water and money.
Building a Smart City is not possible without making it Safe. City authorities can employ the IoT to increase the efficiency of processes in the field of safety of city assets and citizens by using various connected IoT sensors. LoRaWAN™-based system allows real-time monitoring and protection of such assets as manholes which have a lot of theft issues, both for the cover’s metal content and the valuable assets down below like fiber cables. It also enables people and item location, restricted access control, and life care.
CHALLENGES
Degraded power lines are a major cause of exploding manholes and stray voltage. Security related issues include theft, tampering and terrorism linked to manhole and other subsurface structures. And there is no real-time monitoring of manhole opening in the streets, requiring manual inspection. As for moving city assets (vehicles, bikes) and people, an efficient geolocation solution is needed.
SOLUTION
Actility can provide a single, unified IoT connectivity platform for smart and safe city use cases. Battery-operated sensors are installed to detect manhole related incidents, people and assets can be equipped with trackers. Signals are transmitted securely from device to a dashboard or the City Control center application, with LoRaWAN™ operating over long distances in harsh and deep indoor environments.
BENEFITS
With the manhole monitoring, automated incident detection allow a quicker response to threats. Street safety is improved by monitoring if unwanted manhole opening is done. IoT sensors and trackers provide the data for situational awareness and visibility enabling city operation services and law enforcement to effectively and proactively respond to any event, reduce the number of offenses and ensure public safety.
Smart city traffic control and fleet management applications are very beneficial for the urban environment, allowing to optimize city’s vehicles use, to divert traffic in the case of an incident and keep people moving. Reducing traffic congestion brings millions in higher productivity and decreased carbon footprint. LoRaWAN™-enabled tracking devices bring the opportunity to monitor in real-time the city’s vehicle fleet like buses and bicycles, to optimize routes and protect the assets using geolocation. Also, when linked to air quality monitoring, it helps to understand and prevent pollution spikes.
CHALLENGES
City operations require fleet tracking to optimize the usage of their vehicle fleet. Bike sharing providers require geolocation to pinpoint on smartphone application the location of the bicycles. But the use of cellular networks is not cost-efficient and often the coverage is not good enough in remote location or dense building areas. Also most of bus stops do not provide up-to-date information on bus schedules.
SOLUTIONS
Using road sensor and trackers on buses and bicycles, city officials can collect and aggregate data through Actility’s IoT connectivity platform. Drivers can be alerted of accidents and directed to routes that are less congested. Smart traffic signals can adjust their timing. Connected road signs can show information on digital e-ink screens updated using LoRaWAN™. The signs can also detect shock or movement, triggering alerts to the local police.
BENEFITS
LoRaWAN™ GPS trackers have a high battery life, reducing maintenance & operations, while LoRaWAN-enabled fleet can be integrated into Smart City dashboard, allowing high level data management system about traffic. It can provide real-time information on bus arrivals, bus routes, detailed schedules, as well as service conditions and emergency communications. At the end, the city enjoys less congestion, less pollution and higher levels of liveability.
Connecting trains, equipment, tracks, stations, and the operations center using LoRaWAN™ allows to lower operating expenses and to simplify maintenace globally for railway infrastructure operators.
Water tanks level remote control in trains
Train doors openings & closings
Rail temperature & vibration monitoring
Train cars tracking in yards and on the road
Battery systems monitoring
Low network Total Cost of Ownership: LoRaWAN™ has the lowest cost for network infrastructure deployment and maintenance thanks to its high link budget, long range, good redundancy and ease for scaling densification.
Flexibility in network deployment models: cities have the choice to either deploy their own city-scale LoRaWAN networks or leverage existing public ones. The network serves existing business units and can be built on existing city infrastructure.
Advanced technical attributes: very low-power bi-directional communications, deep indoor penetration and can work in a remote, harsh environment, high reliability of the network infrastructure and the sensors
Battery Life Optimization: LoRaWAN industrial sensors are optimized for a battery life of up to 15 years, and for transmission frequency, LoRaWAN offers one of the best options for mitigating battery life issues through network densification.
High security: the LoRaWAN specification uses 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithms to provide end-to-end encryption using two keys: one for the users, for protection of payload content; another for operators, for network authentication security.
Fast-Growing Open Ecosystem of Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs): cities have the flexibility to integrate devices from multiple vendors and benefit from interoperability at the network level.
You can buy sensors and tracking devices for off-the-shelf and also packaged IoT Solutions on ThingPark Market, the largest catalog of IoT devices and applications, powered by Actility
If you are looking to deploy a network or implement custom Smart City IoT solutions using our IoT connectivity platform, you can reach out to us through our contact form
Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technology is a key element to fulfill the growing Smart City demands. Actility allows cities to enable various services using a single shared IoT platform rather than existing vertical single-service solutions (e.g. a dedicated connectivity network for street lighting alone). The vertical use cases include smart parking, connected street lighting, connected waste bins, air quality sensors, manhole monitoring, bus tracking solutions and much more. City authorities also benefit from a set of high performance Actility partners applications to help optimize operations, automate processes and manage the huge amount of data generated by a Smart City IoT network. The fully integrated solution uses intelligent algorithms, advanced analytics and machine learning for process modelling, real-time control and predictive maintenance operations.
Actility provides its LoRaWAN™ network server and software to cover cities and urban regions with public city-owned or private networks, under a unified, scalable, multipurpose IoT network infrastructure. Based on open technologies like LoRaWAN™, a single platform facilitates the deployment, operation, and maintenance of smart city projects, and potentially offers an additional service enabler that the city can offer to local companies and industries for their own third-party applications. The LPWA network is a cost-effective solution which allows cities to have complete control of the network and data with only a few base stations, and managing sensors and devices with a very low Total Cost of Ownership.
The LPWA network is a cost-effective solution which allows logistics companies and operators to have complete control of the network and data with only a few base stations, and managing sensors and devices with a very low Total Cost of Ownership. Once the network is deployed, it’s easy and cost-effective to expand the value of the network investment over time by adding new devices. It also provides standardized, robust security; state-of-the art network management tools; and high quality of service. Through an ecosystem of partners utilizing Actility’s interoperable platform, industries can now leverage significant advancements in IoT technology, including multi-application networks; cloud computing; data analytics; and a new generation of battery-powered edge devices and sensors. All these technologies come together in our IoT connectivity platform that delivers new and differentiating value to enable smart utilities.
Enterprise-grade LoRaWAN™ platform with best-in-class user experience and Actility’s market-leading technology. Easy to set up, operate and support.
A large ecosystem with a wide set of industrial use cases fitting small to high-density deployment with the most suitable performance & economics based on a progressive pricing model.
Fully flexible solution supporting multiple deployment requirements (SaaS or On-Premise), multiple ISM bands, multiple gateway vendors (outdoor or indoor) and multiple IoT application platforms (MS Azure, AWS, IBM, etc).
End to End Secure solution from the device to the Application using LoRaWAN standard and Actility’s additional security features.
The market leading, most complete, powerful and flexible multi-technology LPWA IoT Network platform. ThingPark Wireless is the preferred IoT network platform for Service Providers rolling out LPWA connectivity services, already powering over half of national LoRaWAN™ network deployments worldwide
ThingPark Wireless is the heart of your IoT network, enabling secure connectivity, data flow, and management from sensors to cloud applications. ThingPark Wireless is modular, and scales easily, enabling Service Providers to monetize connectivity and accelerate the adoption of IoT solutions across multiple industries.
Learn more about the LoRaWAN technology by downloading the Actility “What is LoRaWAN” white paper
