Smart cities as an application of internet of things: experiences and lessons learnt in Barcelona

Abstract

Internet of things is a ubiquitous technology that will be present everywhere. One of the first applications will be smart cities. Cities are growing in population and citizens demand better services from the administration without increasing taxes. The only way to attend this demand is to improve information and how this is treated to take decisions. In other words, we should make the city smart. Smart cities are a novel concept that defines new technologies but also reuses some of the existing ones. All novel solutions phase the same problem: the lack of standards and widely accepted solutions. The City of Barcelona with the collaboration from research centers and industrial partners has been testing the smart city concept with the double purpose to contribute to the creation of standards and providing in the interim a solution to cope with the heterogeneity of providers, in particular from the wireless sensor part. This work has been structured as a "Barcelona Intelligent City" project or BCI. BCI project considers all the steps of the data process from its capture by a sensor network to the processing to make it relevant (pointing events that requires attention) and rich (with context information). Conclusions from the pilots has started to be applied. One example is the sensoring in civil works control. This paper includes some lines about Avinguda de l'Estatut Civil Works Project and its conclusions.