The presentation describes how an Integrated Township Operations Center (Smart City) may be created quickly using People as Sensors and then evolve with other sensors over time. It is a project idea that campuses can try.

1. © 2015 IBM Corporation
Integrated Township Operations Center
Jump-started by People as Sensors
Biplav Srivastava, Ullas Nambiar, Vikas Agarwal, Sumit Mittal
Dec 2010
Instrumented Interconnected Intelligent Smarter

2. © 2015 IBM Corporation
Helping build a smarter planet
Motivation and Problem
§ An integrated township has elements of multiple domains like traffic, water, energy, public
safety and health.
§ Benefit Possible:
• Getting a composite view helps administrators make timely decisions
• Helps optimize resources across domains (Smarter cities value)
§ Problem:
• Getting data from instrumentation is costly, slow, noisy, insufficient and error-prone
• Once data is obtained, getting interconnection right is complicated
• Getting integration across domains is hard, given the challenges with physical sensors
• Time to value is too long and subject to too many variables, including physical limitations
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3. © 2015 IBM Corporation
Helping build a smarter planet
Solution Idea and Advantages
§ Idea
– Ask people to give information about sensing information in different domains in a uniform,
structured manner
– Exact affected domains can be inferred
– Status of individual and across domains is updated
– Jumpstarts integration while physical sensors are integrated in parallel
§ Advantages
– Expedites time to value
– Improves acceptance of solution
– Integration issues are removed while physical sensors are tested/ integrated separately
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4. © 2015 IBM Corporation
Helping build a smarter planet
Mockup
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City: <My Town>
Date: <6 Sep 2010>
Time: <Local Time>
Name: <Manish Nambiar>
Role: <Town Mayor>
Town
Monitor
Safety
Traffic
Energy
Water
Health
Overall
Situation:
• Water leakage in some region
• People are agitated
• Electricity has to be cut off to
help repairs
• Sanitation issues
• Traffic unaffected
Town Context:
• Class 2 city in India
• State utilities provide
basic amenities
• Limited budget, need to
show early results

5. © 2015 IBM Corporation
Helping build a smarter planet
Format for Entering Information
§ Location: [Pre-defined list of city regions auto-completed based on first-few letters]
§ Domain: [Traffic, Water, Energy, Public Safety, Health]
§ Status: [Red, Yellow, Green, Unknown] + <Optional data>
– Optional data can be speed in traffic, kw-hour in energy, etc.
– Depending on device capability, it can be audio, image or video as well.
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6. © 2015 IBM Corporation
Helping build a smarter planet
Uniform Manner of Asking Inputs from Crowd and Inference
Unknown
(Gray)
Green Yellow Red
Unknown (Gray) Unknown (Gray) Unknown (Gray) Unknown (Gray) Unknown (Gray)
Green Unknown (Gray) Green Yellow Red
Yellow Unknown (Gray) Yellow Yellow Red
Red Unknown (Gray) Red Red Red
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Levels for status for a domain in highest to lowest order:
• 4-level example: Unknown, Green, Yellow, Red
• Semantic based on domain
• Semantics for traffic = unknown speed, free flow, slow traffic and congested traffic
• Semantics for water = unknown pressure, high pressure, medium pressure and no/ low pressure
• Semantics for energy= unknown supply, high availability, supply limited and power outage
• Semantics for safety= unknown, no incidents, minor incidents and major incident(s) reported
• Semantics for health= unknown status, hospital beds available, beds limited and no bed availability
Inferring composite status across domains:
• Conservative aggregation: If level-1 and level-2 are status levels for two domains, composite level = min(level-1, level-2)
• Majority aggregation: aggregate level is the level of the maximum number of domains
Illustration of conservative aggregation

7. © 2015 IBM Corporation
Helping build a smarter planet
Some Scenario Details
Actors Information
uploaded
Information
sent
Safety Citizens, Police personnel Text (incident), Video,
Audio
Text (advisory)
Traffic Citizens, Municipal workers,
Police personnel
Text (speed, condition),
Video, Audio
Text (advisory)
Energy Citizens, Energy utility
personnel
Text (outage) Text (advisory)
Water Citizens, Water utility
personnel
Text (outage) Text (advisory)
Health Citizens, Hospital contact Text (condition) Text (advisory)
Overall Administrative heads,
emergency management
personnel
Text (instructions),
Video, Audio
Text (advisory)
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