Enabling intelligent and interactive immersion in smart environments

Abstract

In recent years, the Smart City concept has grown in popularity, and a significant number of cities around the world have adopted smart city strategies. Smart and sustainable cities are an emerging urban development approach due to their immense potential to improve environmental sustainability. The Smart City concept is based on collecting, analyzing, and displaying a large amount of data and information concerning urban systems and subsystems. As time goes by, the capacity of smart cities for generating digital information has grown exponentially. However, this digital information is heterogeneous, massive, collected from different sources, generated in different formats, and in most cases not structured, which exacerbates the situation of extracting valuable knowledge from data. Therefore, it is fundamental to handle the significant volumes of heterogeneous sensed data and to integrate such data along with information and analysis tools into a comprehensive platform. This can ensure the security, efficiency, and performance of the different Smart City tasks. A comprehensive software platform could provide services such as facilities for application development, integration of heterogeneous data sources, deployment, and management to ease the construction of sophisticated Smart Cities’ applications. In this context, the work begins with a concise description of the concept of smart city and the technologies involved in it. It addresses the development of an urban data platform along with how to obtain and integrate information from sensors and other data sources, in order to provide aggregated and intelligent views of raw data to support various domains within the city; in our case, smart mobility. The platform architecture is implemented following a five-layer model that considers elements from perception, sensing to data management, processing, and visualization. With the aim of evaluating the efficiency of the developed platform, three different use cases are described and analyzed, which have been implemented in the city of Pamplona, Spain, as vertical services linked to the platform: intelligent urban mobility-bike handling, bike-2-bike communication, and restricted vehicle access zone control system. Ultimately, this work provides an experiment to assess different long-range wireless communication technologies to enable their implementation within an urban environment.