Electricity + Control March 2018

Sigfox Partnership, IIoT and Smart Cities Dave Wibberley, Adroit Technologies

The perfect software platform to achieve the integration required for a ‘Smart City’ and an obvious choice for cities wishing to start the journey to ‘SMART’.

Take Note!

IIoT and Smart City pro- jects are a new arena. Success at each stage of planning an IIoT or Smart City project must be ensured. Ultimately, a Smart City is one with lean and ef- ficient city management – and happy citizens.

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A droit Technologies (further referred to in this article as ‘the company’), signed a part- nership agreement with SqwidNet, the li- censed SIGFOX IoT network operator in South Af- rica towards the end of 2017. SIGFOX is the leading provider of global IoT connectivity with network deployments in 36 countries at present.Their prop- osition comprises low-cost, long-range, low-power modules and devices, that serve up IoT data in a secure and cost-efficient manner to application and service providers. The partnership opens up excellent opportunities for IIoT application and service providers to use the cloud-based SCADA and industrial-automation platforms offered by the company. Data from sensors and devices can now be seamlessly served up to the company-hosted platform environment via the SIGFOX network. Smart City A Smart City, by definition, is an urban area that uses different types of electronic data collection sensors to supply information used to manage assets and resources efficiently. This includes data collected from citizens, devices, and assets. This data is pro- cessed and analysed to monitor and manage traffic and transportation systems, power plants, water supply networks, waste management, law enforce- ment, information systems, schools, libraries, hos-

pitals, and other community services. A Smart City system is made up of a host of complex individual systems targeting niche verticals. This compounds the problem of obtaining a holistic view and deriv- ing the benefits on offer by very few companies that can deliver a complete view. The company of- fers the perfect software platform to achieve this integration and is an obvious choice for cities wish- ing to start this journey. The Adroit Smart UI Portal and the related SCA- DA, the Alarm Management and Big Data Analyt- ics and Reporting platform, SCADA Intelligence are a perfect integration platform for a City to be able to begin this important journey to digitisation. When embarking on a Smart City project, it is im- portant to determine and decide on the architecture from the beginning as changing it later or during the project will add greatly to the cost, and will limit the potential benefits as the project grows. The scale or size of the project is an important consideration when choosing the technology that makes up the system. However, the individual needs of every project would need to be detailed and architected within the IT and Network standards, contractual obligations etc. used by the individual City. What does a Smart City Architecture look like?

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A part of our Sigfox Partnership and IoT digital transformation, the company has created an online working live demo to represent some partners’ Sigfox devices.

Smart Buildings

Shopping Centres, Office Parks, Educational Institutions, Houses, Libraries, Hospitals, Community Centres Water Metering, Reservoirs, Towers, Pipeline Pressure Monitoring, Quality Monitoring, Manhole Management Public Transport, Traffic Management, Parking, Traffic Lights, Security, Tolling, Congestion Charging, Deliveries City Lighting, Street Lighting, City Power, Metering (Energy, Gas) CCTV, Intruder Control, Object Detection, Drones, Facial Recognition, Emergency Management Event Management, Recreation, Emergency Responses, Municipal Services, Weather Intelligence

Lighting, Power, Back-up, Fire Protection, HVAC, Security, Asset Management, Logistics, IT Management Drinking Water, Waste Water Treatment, Surface Water, Seawater Desalination, Marine, Offshore, Pumped Storage Plants

Smart Water

Smart Transport Smart Energy Smart Security Smart Services

Figure 1: Components of ‘Smart Cities’.

24 Electricity + Control

MARCH 2018