IoT Orchestration Applied to Cities and Emergency Vehicles

Cities around the world are embarking on their smart journey at a very fast pace. At the same time, law enforcement officers increasingly depend on connected police car services to carry out their duties effectively. These are positive signs of digital transformation powered by the Internet of Things (IoT)—right?

Well, not so fast. If you take a closer look, most of these smart services are deployed as siloed, vendor-specific solutions run by different stakeholders. So even when these services are crossing the boundaries of multiple verticals, consolidating such purpose-built IoT solutions still remains a daunting task. In fact, managing a heterogeneous IoT infrastructure and orchestrating a diverse set of services across fog, network and cloud has been largely a pipedream. Until now.

Now the Cisco Corporate Strategic Innovation Group (CSIG) is working on a co-innovation project to bring this dream much closer to reality. Imagine a scenario where provisioning a new fog device or updating a service—which used to take hours or days—can now be completed in just minutes at any location, at any time, across multiple police cars and city infrastructure elements from a single point of control.

At Cisco Live Barcelona 2018, we will present these exciting innovations in action, using multiple demos developed in partnership with the City of Barcelona, Federal Signal VAMA, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, NearbySensor, Elecnor, Carandini, and Acisa.

To minimize the amount of infrastructure that needs to be installed and powered today for smart city solutions, we have repurposed the infrastructure cabinets located on streets across Barcelona to aggregate fog nodes and make them a strategic point of control. We then unified heterogeneous fog devices such as industrial PCs in street cabinets, mobile fog nodes in police cars, and low-compute nodes such as the small and affordable Raspberry Pi computers—all managed from a single dashboard. We will also show how virtualized services from different city tenants such as emergencies, city energy, street lighting, traffic control and environmental departments can be hosted and run concurrently in a vendor-neutral fog environment.

In another demo showing vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, we will demonstrate a police car taking control of external cameras mounted on the city’s street cabinets and requesting video-on-demand services in real-time. This is an excellent cross-vertical example where a police officer can be instantly served by automatically deploying an ad-hoc fog service such as analytics on a city infrastructure node.

At CSIG, we are taking a new approach to simplifying the entire IoT orchestration process. We are empowering IoT solution providers and system integrators with exciting new tools that will make them the new superheroes of integration. Having a future-proof solution across verticals rather than single purpose-built integration will be a waypoint on the truly transformative journey that lies ahead of us.

If you want to learn more about how Cisco innovation is helping cities, police departments and other verticals such as energy and utilities by keeping their costs down and maintenance standards high, please visit us at Strategic Innovation Zone, in the World of Solutions at Cisco Live Barcelona 2018. Or you can learn more about how it works here.   I hope to see you in Barcelona!