Smart Cities

The Smart City is a game changer for marketing, logistics and retail. Harnessing geospatial insight in real-time and combining it with third-party data will bring serious financial growth, sustainably benefitting the urban environment and all who interact with it.

• David Cockrell, allmapdata Director

 

Smart City Definition

Smart Cities use information and communication technologies to ensure they meet the needs of their people – improving efficiency of service provision and urban operations, quality of life, and economic success. They aim to secure a better environment now and for generations to come. The Smart City approach is intended to improve lives by providing greater access to the city’s public services, reducing duplication of effort, maximising appropriate automation and enabling better services and faster response times while making the whole area more secure and economically successful.

 

Example Smart City Applications

Smart Cities will use the Internet of Things (IoT) to improve efficiency. Examples include embedding sensors in parking spaces, cycle racks and electric vehicle charging points so citizens can use a smartphone app to tell them where to find available car park spaces, bikes and vacant charging  points. This approach could significantly reduce traffic congestion. 

Aggregated mobile phone data can identify “hot spots” at different times of day, so city planners and commercial businesses can make sure facilities are available at locations where people are already congregated to reduce unnecessary journeys.

In addition to private vehicle journeys, the efficient use of city vehicles is also key in Smart Cities, so optimised routing of waste collection, street cleaning and maintenance vehicles etc. are all part of the vision. Mapmechanics has many years experience in optimising journeys and calculating travel-times that take account of many criteria. For example, optimising collect and deliver routes to ensure each vehicle drops off and picks up items in a sequence that makes the best use the vehicle’s capacity.

 

Accurate spatial data is key to success

Location is a key factor that links a wide range of Smart City projects. Whether you need to pinpoint where facilities are based, the most efficient routes to take to deliver services or identify who is affected by city works such as interruptions in service supply, spatial data will be the key to efficiency and insight.

allmapdata offers road networks with speeds, navigational restrictions and building types; postcode and zipcodes to accurately place your own data on the map; detailed demographics by time of day, catchments; comprehensive drive time matrices to power optimisers and many other data products and consultancy services to help streamline city processes.