The Smart City Operating System will turn the city of Hull into a programmable city
Hull, a city located on England’s north-east coast, will become the first city in the U.K. to establish a purpose-built Smart City Operating System (OS). Using an internet of things (IoT) foundation, the CityOS platform provided by smart city operator Connexin, built around Cisco’s Kinetic for Cities platform, will turn Hull into a programmable city.
The OS, considered to be the first of its type in the U.K., will connect essential council services and centralize information from multiple sources that can be analyzed to improve residential life in the city.
Councilor Daren Hale, deputy leader of Hull City Council commented that the project will develop solutions “to enhance data-sharing and decision-making,” which will improve a wide variety of services “from traffic management to health and social care.”
According to Furqan Alamgir, founder and CEO of Connexin, the platform will move the city away from “outdated siloed service driven technologies” and will “improve service delivery, reduce costs and make the most of new technologies such as IoT, AI and machine learning algorithms.”
“The Connexin and Cisco partnership gives Hull the ability to manage sensors from multiple vendors in one place removing the reliance on legacy systems and their associated costs,” Alamgir added.
Scot Gardner, chief executive for Cisco U.K. and Ireland, took a broader perspective, explaining, “When you start to think of a city as programmable, there is opportunity to not only improve individual services with technology, but use combined data insight from those services to create a holistic, actionable view for local authorities.”
Recently, Hull City Council partnered with Connexin to deploy waste management sensors, which will be installed inside the trash bins. The sensors will gather data in real time, monitoring waste levels so that street cleaning teams will be notified when a bin needs emptying.
An analysis of trash bin data will reveal time-effective collection routes and times, making the process of trash collection more efficient and less wasteful by reducing unnecessary vehicle deployments.
These waste management sensors will be incorporated into Hull’s larger Smart City project.
Cisco has been bringing intelligence to cities around the world for some time. Back in 2016, Cisco helped Mississauga, Ontario leverage IoT services in the Canadian city. Earlier that same year, the company worked with Sprint to launch a $15.7 million smart city program in Kansas City.
