Project abstract
A
key challenge faced by city operators, municipalities and political decision makers
is the fragmentation of information into vertically-oriented closed systems and
siloed organization models. The PSCRIMSON (Public
Safety and Crisis Management Service Orchestration) project aims to overcome
these challenges by delivering an integrated 3D digital model and information
platform that facilitates information collection, sharing, management, analysis
and dissemination from diverse public and private urban infrastructures and
resources. The PSCRIMSON platform supports public authorities to improve
quality and efficiency of municipal services and enhance their resilience in
the presence of adverse conditions. Furthermore, adequate security and
authentication methods allow selected urban data sources to be exposed to the
full smart city ecosystem, which is a key enabler for the development of
innovative data-driven applications and services stimulating economic activity
and supporting job growth.
The PSCRIMSON platform will
bring together the visually-oriented, intuitive nature of Geographic
Information Systems (GIS) and the highly dynamic real-time contextual data
streams that are made accessible through interoperable ICT-backends
of public and private urban infrastructures. Augmented with 3D city models and
visualization capabilities, the PSCRIMSON information platform provides
unprecedented situational awareness that improves operational decision making
and allows procedures and planning to be evaluated.
The benefits of service
orchestration through the PSCRIMSON platform will be demonstrated in the
context of three closely-related use cases: crisis
management, public safety management
and disaster management. These
demonstrators will be hosted in Istanbul, Rotterdam and Vancouver.
With contributions from
Canada, Turkey and the Netherlands, the PSCRIMSON consortium is composed of
partners that cover the full market value chain of urban data providers,
platform providers and application and service providers. The consortium
composition carefully balances the scale and impact of large industrial
partners providing and operating major urban infrastructures and platforms with
the in-depth expertise of academic institutes and the innovative power of
selected SMEs. Moreover, the project will actively engage with citizens and
end-user organizations throughout the project to stimulate acceptance, validate
scalability and optimize impact.
Project partners
ViNotion B.V., The Netherlands
CycloMedia Technology B.V., The Netherlands
Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Project overview
Problem statement and market value chain
Due to rapid
urbanization, it is expected that by the year 2025 2 billion people will live
in an urban environment and cities will account for ~70% of economic activity
worldwide. Such concentration imposes severe challenges on city administrations
around the globe to support sustainable growth and ensure that cities remain
attractive places for people to spend their lives in. Smart Cities employ information
and communication technologies (ICT) to improve the quality, cost-efficiency
and inter-activity of urban critical infrastructure and services, such as
administration, education, healthcare, public safety, real estate,
transportation and utilities. Whereas the rapid penetration of IoT infrastructure, mobile devices, and data-driven digital
service models offers the potential for new breakthrough solutions, a key
challenge faced by smart city operators, municipalities and political decision
makers is the fragmentation of information into vertically-oriented closed
systems and siloed organization models. The lack of
common platforms, data repositories and toolsets with advanced services for the
smart city is still hindering the development of an effective digital urban
ecosystem. Furthermore, widespread adoption of such platforms critically
depends on high standards of information security that inspires trusts from its
users. To achieve this, legal, administrative and political challenges, as well
as technical challenges relating to secure and reliable access to sensitive
information and threat-free ubiquitous access to the internet and e-services
need to be overcome.
Figure 1. Market Value
chain
The
PSCRIMSON project aims to bridge the above gaps and barriers by developing
digital city models with integrated information platforms that facilitate data
exchange between and service delivery to different city entities e.g. public
authorities, businesses and citizens. Combining diverse real-time information
streams with realistic city models and simulation functionality, this platform
will drive the future development of cities stimulating local economic activity
based on development of new data-driven services and applications and helping
city operators address the huge demands associated with population growth. To
inspire trust and solicit adoption, the platform will employ world-class
end-to-end security and privacy mechanisms and adequate access authorization
management.
Whilst
the PSCRIMSON city information model is capable of creating value for public
authorities, businesses and citizens across the smart city application
spectrum, its capabilities will be demonstrated specifically in the context of
crisis management, public safety management and decision support for event
management. These use case are described in further detail in section 2.3.2 and
share the following key challenges:
Complete situational awareness: Public
safety and crisis management greatly benefit from bringing together different
data sources to provide a complete picture of what is happening on the ground.
Combined with historical datasets, full situational awareness drives analysis
and supports decision makers.
Assessment of procedures and decision making
models: Existing systems lack capabilities to functionally
test both infrastructure and safety procedures prior to their deployment. To
this end, PSCRIMSON will integrate simulation capabilities to reproduce in
realistic synthetic environments the functioning of different infrastructures
as well as the human behavior and interaction of people with these systems and test procedures
and decision making models.
Integrated
resource management and planning on the tactical and operational level: Resource
management and planning are crucial issues both in day-to-day city operations
as well as in severe adverse conditions. The city information model should
provide specified and standardized tools that allow operations staff to manage
field operations, answer questions about impact, illustrate and convey planned
activities, and monitor response efforts.
The
market value chain is depicted below. End-users will pay service fees for the
data-driven applications and services offered to them on the basis of the urban
information platform. The service providers, in turn, will have to pay
subscription fees to the platform providers as well as access fees (fixed rate
or per pay per use use) to data providers to receive specific information
streams published on the information exchange and incorporate these in their
service offerings. Finally, platform providers could demand a subscription fee
to data providers for the right to publish their information stream on the
urban information platform.
The international
consortium consists of partners from the Netherlands, Canada and Turkey that
bring together complementary core competences covering the full market value
chain composed of urban data providers, platform and orchestration service
providers, application and service providers and end-user organizations.
Urban data providers: Cyclomedia and TUE provide geo-referenced panoramic and
aerial imagery in common GIS-formats as input to the target urban model taking
the next step in transforming from 2D to 3D data provider. Information about
visitor numbers, their walking patterns and behaviors, as provided by the
camera-based solutions of ViNotion and incident detection algorithms as developed by TUE, rank amongst the most valuable
urban information sources with applications in domains such as public safety,
retail analytics and city branding. Philips
Lighting focuses on leveraging the high density and ubiquitous nature of
connected street lighting systems as a platform for street-level contextual
data acquisition (smart poles providing power and connectivity hosting relevant
sensors.) and influencing individual and collective human behavior by means of
light. Enerjisa
actively controls an extensive urban energy infrastructure and will enable data
acquisition for energy network status monitoring based on SCADA and GIS systems
that are continuously extended and updated as a part of current business
activities.
Urban
platform and connectivity providers: Esri Canada
delivers compact geospatial capability with its expertise with the 3D smart
city model based on its core ArcGIS Platform which will be integrated with
related enterprise offerings and information streams. Ericsson assumes to define specification, requirements of the system
architecture and development of crisis management models based on new developed
privacy and security application as a service provider. Turkcell focuses on defining
specifications and requirements of the system architecture and development of
crisis management models giving specific data sources Elektronet aims at defining
specifications and requirements of the system architecture and development of
crisis management models developing smart transportation hardware and software
systems based on data collection,
classification and unique data
templates addressed to transportation management services.
Application
and service providers: ISBAK provides analytics and
advisory services to the city of Istanbul for exploring integrated and
innovative decision making mechanism in case of emergency. It facilitates
functional and user acceptance testing of the augmented platforms at the end of
the project. Esri Canada and Ericsson provide data-driven consultancy services for city planning
and crisis management. Philips Lighting is developing data-driven advisory
services in the public safety domain to complement its lighting products
portfolio.
End-user organizations: PSCRIMSON will actively engage end-user
organizations in the demonstration sites, such as city planners, police and
emergency services, crisis coordination teams in Istanbul, Rotterdam and
Vancouver. Moreover, the consortium will compose end-user sounding boards in
all three domains beyond the demonstration sites themselves to validate the
propositions and ensure scalability.
Project innovations and technology value chain
Project innovations
State-of-the-art GIS systems offer intuitive,
visually-oriented interfaces to urban information sources, but typically focus
on quasi-static information sources. On the other hand, emerging smart city
platforms (see Section 2.3.1) are very focused on the ICT-aspects of achieving
interoperable subsystems to increase the accessibility of fragmented urban data
sources. However, city stakeholders, and especially those in charge with the
city urbanization, lack intuitive interfaces to concretely benefit from all the
urban information scattered across diverse systems.
The PSCRIMSON project aims to address these
challenges by means of the following key innovations:
·
Open
exchange of urban information streams originating from fragmented data sources
(e.g., street-level crowd information, traffic data, status of municipal
assets, position of emergency staff)
·
Realistic
3D city models based with access to real-time urban information streams with
visually-oriented intuitive interfaces.
·
Connected
street lighting systems as backbone for urban contextual data acquisition
·
Adequate
authentication and privacy mechanisms based on two-step authentication on
mobile devices to inspire trust and warrant privacy.
In the context of the use case around crisis
and public safety management, these innovations will result in:
·
Intuitive
real-time situational awareness of municipal services
·
Validated
procedural functionalities for event, public safety and crisis management
Figure 3. Technology Value Chain
Technology Value Chain
The project modular architectural blocks and
their dependencies are shown in Figure 3. The core architectural layers are
Data Acquisition, Platform Orchestration and End-user Applications/Services
with a bottom-up data flow. The Communication and Networking pillar provides a
hardware infrastructure for the project development and its demonstrators.
The Data Acquisition layer is dedicated for
collection and provisioning of real-time dynamic and static data sources, such
as from the network of CCTV surveillance cameras, incident detecting sensors, GIS
datasets and from 3D models of the city. The data is published for the upper
layers and exposed to the applications and services via the Platform and Orchestration
Layer.
The urban information platform should enable
interoperability and plug-and play capabilities for data providers and data
consumers based on open APIs and common information models. Moreover, the
platform should also provide adequate authentication mechanisms for reliable
and secure data provisioning to the applications and services located in the
upper layer.
The
platform layer exposes diverse urban information streams to the Applications
and Services layer. PSCRIMSON project focuses on development of dedicated
technologies/services vital for our end users in Istanbul, Rotterdam and
Vancouver targeting crisis management, public safety management and disaster
management. These systems provide functionality and output data to the
end-users: corresponding city management departments.