Key Data-related Trends Tied to Smart Cities
With the emergence of smart cities and enabling technologies, authorities and other stakeholders will start exploiting new data sources—sensors, meters, and in-car telematics—to improve the efficiency of daily city operations relating to facilities and infrastructure. They will also have to include social media and various Web-data sources in their decision-making models.
City stakeholders are used to dealing with simple and structured data that is limited in volume and velocity. Collection, storage, and processing of M2M data from sensors and meters will pose a challenge for authorities and companies from the energy, transportation, and water sectors. The greatest difficulty will be to define required output of data processing and choose cost-feasible data management platforms. Open data platforms will have to be established to unlock the potential of multi-source data for citizens.
Customers and other smart city stakeholders consume or generate data using mobile devices increasingly often, particularly smartphones and tablets. Their behaviours become more geographic information system (GIS)-related. This drives not only changes in user interface but also in customer interaction strategies.
Smart transportation is receiving a strong boost from local authorities and transportation operators. The intelligent transportation systems (ITS) market in the European Union is in a growth phase and has attractive growth perspectives ahead. Tenders for ITS are being launched in the largest European cities. Over time, new ITS functionalities will emerge that will drive further market growth.
Smart energy is in an early development stage. Energy companies are still looking for a business case for smart grids. The availability of smart meters and grid data will drive investments in customer and grid analytics. Frost & Sullivan foresees that smart energy will bring the highest investment opportunities within smart cities by 2020.
So far, the interest in smart water is low and limited to a few countries. The smart water market presents the weakest growth opportunities by 2020.
2020 Market Trends
Smart Energy (Smart Energy Network)
•Integration of renewables and decentralised energy
•Demand response and demand-side management
•Network monitoring and control Smart Transportation
•Vehicle-to-everything (V2X)
•Driver behaviour management
•Mobile applications based on open data Smart Water
•Pressure management
•Remote control and predictive maintenance
•Integrated platforms for water management
Read more: The Role of ICT in Building Smart Cities – InfrastructureÂ
