City of Things

Cities are relying on Internet of Things (IoT) to make their infrastructure smart by using advanced sensing and control devices within the city's infrastructure with the goal of improving urban living, city's experience, etc. Analysis of the data generated by a wide range of sensors and actuators allows controlling the city in a better and more automated way, with respect to e.g. the view on the city's mobility patterns. To realize a smart city infrastructure we consider three layers: the network/sensor layer, i.e. a city-wide network based on a variety of communication technologies and its protocol stacks together with a variety of sensors allowing the collection of raw data; a data layer, dealing with the continuous stream of data and its techniques for processing, storing, mining; an application layer, responsible for interpreting the processed data stream for more optimally controlling the city. The network/sensor layer will be covered by the MOSAIC research group (Dept. Mathematics and Computer Science, Chris Blondia and Steven Latré), while the data layer will be dealt with by the ADREM research group (Dept. Mathematics and Computer Science, Bart Goethals) and finally the application layer is the responsibility of the Transport and Regional Economics research group (Dept. Transport and Regional Economics, Eddy Van de Voorde and Thierry Vaneslander). The general aim of this project is to bring together the expertise present at the University of Antwerp at each of these layers, in order to bundle the research and come up – through an intensive collaboration - with a framework covering the three layers. More specifically, we will build an integrated smart city platform, tailored towards mobility, that allows to capture, process, analyze, interpret and control smart city data in general and mobility data particularly. As discussed in the next section, this will result in important novel research contributions in each of the three layers and will result in a proof-of-concept where the research results are combined into a demonstrator.

Keywords:SENSOR NETWORKS, TRANSPORT SYSTEMS, NETWORKING, DATA MINING

Disciplines:Infrastructure, transport and mobility engineering, Data communications, Telecommunication and remote sensing