Big Data Is Crucial For Smart Cities

Big Data Is Crucial For Smart Cities

This post is also available in: heעברית (Hebrew)

By now, Smart Cities seem almost an inevitability. With more and more cities implementing city projects to modernise interactions between governments, citizens, and the physical world itself, we need to have at what makes Smart Cities run.

On the basic level, Smart Cities rely on information and communications technology (ICT) to improve services, interactions, and efficacy. They are meant to reduce costs and resource consumptions by increasing efficiency. But to make these projects tick, there needs to be  logic, analysis, and effective decision making that works in a timely, even real-time, manner.

For this, Big Data is crucial. Smart Cities generate a lot of data. When some infrastructure projects can generate petabytes of hard data each day, Smart Cities, with the millions of sensors involved, can produce a mind-numbing amount of information. There is simply no way for humans to cope with the deluge without the application of some clever analytics capable of dealing with the amount of data.

bigdata2012

Smart traffic lights, for example, organise traffic flow based on how many cars are occupying a given area, where they are going, and congestion patterns. All this needs to be balanced with the needs of both drivers and pedestrians.

These projects don’t come cheap, however. Songdo in the Republic of Korea started its Smart City project in 2000 with an expected completion date sometime in 2018. With an estimated cost of $35 billion, there is little room for mistakes. With projects of this magnitude and cost, you have to make sure to make the most of the investment. When you get it right, however, the benefits can outweigh the costs. Without Big Data, that would be impossible.