Automated cities
Cat Hackforth talks to the creators of the world’s first city-wide
OS
While you’re at work, a
discarded cigarette sets light to a bin and fire begins to lick up the
building. As the fire alarm sounds, the light panels on the office wall turn
green and their 12 x 12 LED grids display scrolling arrows that direct you to
the nearest fire exit. Sensors in the building’s structure alert the emergency
services, who arc directed to the blaze by a yellow line, again displayed on
the LED panels. The fire is quickly extinguished, and further sensors built
into the office confirm that the building
has suffered no Structural damage.
This type of practical
automation of city services is the basis of the Urban OS - a system of networked
sensors, cloud-controlled middleware and simple user interfaces that could
represent the future of cities worldwide.
The Urban Operating System
(UOS) is the work of Living PlanIT, a technology company whose partners include
Microsoft, McLaren and Cisco. Its aim is to reduce waste, improve safety and
enhance quality of life for its residents. UOS takes its cues from mobile
operating systems like lOS and Android, with small programs called PlaceApps
controlling functions within the city-everything from street lighting and
traffic management to domestic appliances. These apps will be accessible from a
wide range of devices, including smartphones and wall panels.
App development
The first buildings based on the Urban OS are bieng built in
Greenwich and in PlanIT Valley in Portugal. There is also a project underway in
Birmingham
“The idea of the PlaceApps
is that most of the logic actually runs server-side, rather like an iPhone app,”
explains John Stenlake, Chief Technology Officer at Living Plan IT. “The app
principally consists of a few service calls and then you have a pretty thin
binding to the actual device that consists of some appropriately styled
elements, and whatever validation is needed for buttons or fields. The rest of
it is all done by services at the hack end.”
Stenlake and his team have
already developed a PlaceApp for fire detection and evacuation management. “The
application uses many sensors in the building that might be sensing temperature,”
he says. Some of the sensors appropriately embedded in structures can he good
up to 400°C, so even in a fire they work for a long time before it gets too hot
for them to handle the situation, thereby providing a lot of very useful
informal ion about what the problem is, where it’s happening and how it’s
spreading.
Urban OS in the UK
The operating system will work best in new buildings with the
necessary infrastructure already in place. Conversion of older buildings is
less viable
Living PlanIT is building
a test bed for the Urban OS in Portugal (PlanIT Valley), but the technology
could arrive here first. “It’s quite likely that the first buildings our technology
goes into will be in Greenwich,” says Stenlake. “One of our partners is
Quintain Estates and Development, which is a very forward looking developer.
Adrian Wyatt, their CEO, is a real visionary who had figured out the need for
some of this stuff before we came along, and it was very much a meeting of
minds. They have new developments going on around Greenwich peninsula, around
the 02, in association with Lend Lease. We’re very much looking forward to that
- we think that will just beat the first buildings in Plan IT Valley out of the
ground.”
PlaceApp security
Urban Plan IT
is developing a bank of PlaceApps for Urban OS, but the company plans to
publish its API so everyone from partners like Microsoft to self-taught bedroom
coders can try their hand at PlaceApp development and even sell their creations
in a virtual store.
With the Urban
OS and its apps permeating every aspect of city life, we asked John Stenlake
what the company was doing to avoid compromising residents’ security and
privacy.
“In the general
case, I don’t think there will be a lot of data that actually persists on the
device, and anything that does persist we can encrypt, so quite honestly I
don’t think there’s a huge security problem there,” he told us. “Obviously
security and privacy is really important, and so all of the APIs require
authentication, and there are authorisation levels by role and by identity for
any call that you want to make against those APIs. A lot of these things end up
being contextual, so for example you would be able to remotely control certain
things in your apartment from your smartphone, but you wouldn’t be able to do
it with your friend’s apartment — not even if you were standing in it, unless
your friend had granted you those permissions.”
