ICT
The growth of cities is a phenomenon that is often unplanned, leading to serious social problems, such as traffic congestion, pollution and energy waste. Trinity College Dublin’s Future Cities Research Centre has a vision for an efficient and sustainable city, in which citizens are safe, productive and included
Smart and sustainable cities
Future Cities is a new, multi-disciplinary research
centre resources, harness the management. in Dublin, which will
address the required optimisation of the city’s
life within growth
potential for business, reduce the city’s environmental impact, and improve citizens’ quality of
urban
environments. Much has been said about the impact that big data and analytics can have on the optimisation of resource use, but Professor Siobhán Clarke believes that it
is of greater importance to take this
knowledge and put it into action. “What we want to achieve through our work at Future Cities is to come up with ways in which we can actually effect behavioural change and enable more sustainable use of a city’s resources,
such as roads, energy and
water,” says Clarke. “Obviously you cannot automate people’s behaviour, so it’s also about engaging citizens so that they can see the benefit
behaviour or allowing something to be automated can bring.”
Intelligent traffic Traffic
congestion costs the EU
approximately €100bn per year, and so a number of projects within Future Cities have been developing solutions to some of the more common problems within traffic
38 Although wireless
communication cannot yet be relied upon to organise traffic, researchers have been investigating how vehicles
can use
(unreliable) wireless communication and sensing to collaborate and improve traffic efficiency. “In many situations such as a three-lane
motorway merging into two
lanes, humans are truly dreadful drivers,” says Clarke. “People keep starting and stopping, and this congestion almost
inevitable. However,
hesitation makes if
all the cars on the motorway were able to communicate with each other, they could be simply managed in a slot-based system, allowing a smooth flow of traffic.” With Google having recently developed
a driverless car, with a number of mainstream
car that a change in their manufacturers also
involved, this technology might not be planted as distantly in the future as one first thinks. “If you’d asked me two or three years ago whether I thought this could be mainstream within five to ten years, I would have said no,” says Clarke. “Now, I would be much more optimistic.” Statistics show that a very high proportion of road accidents are caused by human error, and so automated cars could save lives as well as causing fewer headaches for insurance companies.
Professor Siobhán Clarke Siobhán Clarke is a Professor in the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, with research interests in dynamic software services for urban stakeholders in large-scale, mobile environments. She is the Director of Future Cities, the Trinity Centre for Smart and Sustainable Cities, and a Fellow of TCD.
MAIN CONTACT The Future Cities centre is also in the
process of patenting technology for self- organising urban traffic management
to
relieve urban congestion. By making each traffic light smart rather than relying on a central controller, traffic lights could learn the optimal signal settings for particular local traffic conditions, as well as cooperate with neighbouring traffic lights to optimise traffic city-wide.”
Insight Publishers | Projects
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