More and more cities are relying on software to manage and control devices in the urban area

City monitoring and control platforms arise from the need to make good decisions regarding urban life. Thus, to know data like the consumption of the lighting, to measure the acoustic pollution or of the air, to have control of the traffic of certain streets… Constitute a very valuable information that is given by multiple sensors and devices in different formats and technologies.

Currently many of these sensors and devices already have their own platforms or use more conventional methods such as file transfers. However, managing such a large urban infrastructure is tedious and making comparisons between devices are too manual.

And, in view of this situation, platforms such as W-City are born, capable of capturing, processing and unifying all this information in a single platform, thus allowing the management of all the sensors and their information.

Advantages of monitoring and control platforms

Having all this information centralized, as we mentioned before, is already benefitial. Even so, other advantages of this option to control a metropolis would be, for example, to make decisions and to analyze with more criteria, to create alarms, to control the luminaires according to other sensors, to send installers, etc.

Let’s look at some practical examples that we could achieve with these platforms.

• Contamination detection and alarm
• Detecting fraud attempts on the electricity network
• Dimming control in luminaires to reduce consumption
• Detecting malfunctions in luminaires
• Find the relationship between the amount of traffic and the measured pollution, in order to decide where to redirect the traffic
• Detection of damaged devices
• Creating work orders for maintainers automatically

The conclusion is obvious, since the birth of the concept of the Internet of things (IoT) and its implementation in everything that surrounds us, the need to be able to visualize all this information in an orderly and concise way, is very strong, and the monitoring and control platforms like W-City, fulfill this purpose.