PACT aims to design "things" as intelligent citizens that can leverage new urban infrastructures to help purify air in cities. The project will develop methods for defining things with agency in cities and how they can operate independently while interacting with citizens. A special connection will be made with the Roboat project in Amsterdam to test how autonomous fleets of boats can take agency and function as demonstrators. PACT will use catalytic sensors and coatings on things to purify nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide from the air, with open communication standards for citizen improvements. The goal is to develop novel models and tools for understanding how intelligent things can work with people and existing services to optimize air purification capabilities in cities.

1. PACT (Pure Air for Cities of Things)
Designing things as citizens
to leverage new intelligent infrastructures

2. Partners
in research

3. A new type of City Things
in an intelligent urban structure
Video ‘Rush hour’, Black Sheep Films (https://vimeo.com/106226560)

4. Things will be citizens too
With AI/ML,
things become intelligent nodes in the smart city…

5. New city things
self-agency in dialogue
with citizens

6. research
questions
What defines an object with agency in the urban
context?
How independent of humans should things operate
within an intelligent urban infrastructure?
How should citizens and things operate next to each
other in the city?

7. Roboats
researching intelligent urban infrastructure

8. Roboat
research subject
and demonstrator
A special connection will be made with the Roboat project
of Amsterdam Institute of Advanced Metropolitan
Solutions (AMS).
Roboat can function as an excellent testbed for
researching how and when an autonomous fleet of boats
should take agency as part of an intelligent urban
infrastructure. These experiments could also provide for
excellent demonstrators.
It would be interesting to investigate if we can develop use
cases for the Roboat project based on the outcomes of
PACT, and vice versa if insights on intelligent and adaptive
behaviour can contribute to the PACT research questions
on the role of intelligent things in intelligent urban
infrastructures.

9. The context
Fighting air pollution

10. Clean air prevents non-communicable diseases and reduces
disease risks among women and vulnerable groups, including
children and the elderly (WHO Europe).
But it is also becoming a legal requirement (UK Clear Air Act
1993) with growing impact on businesses.
In the case of Amsterdam, estimating air pollution solely on
vehicular traffic only accounts for a maximum of 25% of
airborne pollution (TNO, 2015).
Even if we were to plant a few million of new trees, it will lower
the baseline pollution but will not react to a peak of pollution.
The proposed approach represents a paradigm shift in
catalysis from efficiency to capacity, from concentrated
production to distributed production.
Not only in China
In Amsterdam too…

11. 11
polluted air purified aircatalytic sensor

12. Static measures won’t work
to deal with peak pollutions
https://www.studioroosegaarde.net/project/smog-free-project-china/

13. We will use catalytic sensors targeting specifically Nitrogen
Oxides (NOx) and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and low-cost coating
for photocatalytic reaction to both UV- and white light.
The system for communication between the objects will be
open standard, available for citizen improvements.
Open standards
for sustainable
functioning

14. Things as citizens
acting to optimise the
purifying capabilities

15. Novel models
and tools
for intelligent
actuation
PACT (Pure Air for Cities of Things) aims to develop novel
methods and tools for understanding and demonstrating
how intelligent things can act in concert with people and
connect to existing data and cloud services.
The project will use the context of urban air purification
as a concrete and relevant case but results are expected to
be applicable also to other contexts (energy production,
circular economies, mobility etc.)

16. More info
Elisa Giaccardi, Iskander Smit; irsmit@tudelft.nl