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You've read about cities installing smart parking meters and noise- and air-quality sensors, but are you ready to embrace the idea of a city brain?
The residents of Singapore are on track to do just that.
Creating a centralized dashboard view of sensors deployed across a distributed network is nothing new, but it takes on a bigger -- perhaps ominous -- meaning when deployed across a major city.
Many technologically advanced cities worldwide are exploring ways to build such comprehensive digital views for managing traffic and parking, monitoring water and air quality, and offering such citizen-facing services as web-based tools for interacting with government agencies. Some smart city experts call this system approach a "city brain" or, less glamorously, a "municipal backplane."
Such a setup could be used as a "command and control" center for city infrastructure or as a better way to manage data across disparate agencies and make planning decisions. A municipality, for example, could use aggregated data from sensors to justify a subway expansion or other long-term infrastructure improvements in a 10-year or even a 50-year planning pipeline.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @06:23AM
The trouble faced by all planned economies until now has been the lack of perfect information about the state of supply and demand. With sensors everywhere recording everything, finally there will be enough information to decide with certainty how much sex lube to produce and exactly whose holes want filling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @06:39AM
Psycho-Pass!