How a European Smart City plans to institute World’s first Smart Streetlight Operations & Maintenance of tomorrow

Among the aspiring smart cities of western Europe that stand out as a model for the rest of the world, is one BENELUX city that ranks among Top20 in every index administered to measure cities’ standard of living. Thanks to its best-in-class public transit, a stronger focus on sustainability and low-carbon solutions, and perhaps most important, a culture among its citizens that are more engaged in the journey towards more sustainable and smarter cities – it is one of the Top5 early adopters of new and emerging technologies in living and well-being. Its smart city administrators, our client, have thrived in public private partnerships focused on using the city as an urban laboratory for the use of open data, new mobility solutions and improved quality of life for all residents and visitors. Our client has supported more than 40 smart city projects showcasing newest innovations that affect every aspect of life and their proof of concept with sensfix was no exception.

Our client had recently undertaken energy efficient LED light installations in several parts of the city. Coinciding with this rare event of the city’s infrastructure update, smart city administrators envisioned an overhaul of the processes of procurement, logistics, delivery, installation and service of street lighting. Today’s smart city implementations are tailored to establish inclusive and participatory governance using real-time data, connecting citizens to public infrastructure as well as services. City administrators wanted to digitize and automate streetlight operations & maintenance for –

a) city authorities to have more visibility and control on how streetlight assets are repaired and maintained
b) citizens to be informed in real-time about the public asset maintenance and the inconvenience resulting out of it

The city officials also wanted the city’s public asset Operations & Maintenance (O&M) teams to jointly harness and quickly use real-time operational intelligence coming in from various newly installed sensors on streetlight poles. This ability would support citizen’s health & safety, and sustainability while also allowing for the optimization of costs, energy usage, city traffic, parking and public information systems. It is a challenge to promote citizens to get connected to streetlight poles and all the auxiliary services that are being planned around them for ex: pollution data, traffic data, smart 112, Smart Police Patrol and equip city’s O&M teams with the tools and insights to provide the exceptional services citizens expect, while quickly adapting to their needs.

Another element at play was the need to meet sustainability targets and ensure compliance with new smart city regulations. Achieving both of those goals would require a flexible, scalable, data-driven operating model focused on continual learning and adaptation.

These factors together pointed towards a scalable and flexible platform, could unify all their disparate streetlight operations and maintenance processes like – new tenders for service contracts, current SLAs with third party service providers, city’s streetlight complaint mechanisms, hotline numbers, emailing services, maintenance ledgers – and point software solutions like CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System), EAM (Enterprise Asset Management). This would help them achieve system-wide decision making, execution, and optimization.

Sensfix’s flagship SDM suite was easily customized for client’s smart city application as sens-CitiLight platform. It successfully demonstrated the capabilities the smart city administrators and their O&M team needed and the automated, data-driven operating model they wanted to embrace. Running the Proof of Concept on 720 streetlight poles with newly installed LED lights in a new suburb of the city, designated for smart city implementations, our client was proud to experience a first-of-its-kind smart city innovation. —–
Sensfix successfully implemented a novel solution enabling streetlights to – self-diagnose, search for and schedule the nearest authorized electrician, open and manage the maintenance ticket, log all service actions on a distributed ledger, pay the electrician using a blockchain token and provide a real-time audit of money spent on maintaining streetlights in a smart city.
At the beginning of the project, integrating the new platform with city’s existing systems happened in just a few weeks thanks to Sensfix’s modular and easily integrable solution. Sensfix provides O&M stakeholder specific apps (web & mobile) as well as a citizen app for connecting streetlights to an online collaborative platform where citizens, city officials, stakeholders of asset supply chain and service chain can monitor or control different phases of streetlight operation and maintenance lifecycle.
After a brief onboarding and deployment, the first step of the implementation was to aggregate streetlight data from 720 different poles through various communication protocols like DALI, NB-IoT, LTE/4G, Sigfox, a job made easy with Sensfix’s IoT capability. Sensfix’s IFTTT based rule engine allowed O&M managers to set up rules that triggered diverse actions based on values of parameters coming in from sensors for ex: temperature, time, dimming levels, luminous intensity, current, voltage etc. In addition, sensfix provided a complicated decision-tree based rule orchestration framework that included environmental and operational parameters like inventory status, stock/spare part availability, tool availability, worker availability, permission grants, warranty and service contract conditions etc. in setting up automated decision-making.
Sensfix uses AI and ML methodologies to proactively identify anomalies and resolve streetlight faults and compliance violations. For this proactive maintenance, and to uncover opportunities for improved performance and energy savings, teams rely on an extensive library of standard rules, which can be added to and customized as needed for specific scenarios. Sensfix automatically notifies all stakeholders in real-time on their Apps enabling everyone to transparently trace all automated streetlight service actions that are stored in a tamper-proof manner.
Sensfix executed a holistic operational model with the ability to extend interoperability to future systems as well (for ex: other public assets like traffic lights, pedestrian systems, emergency call boxes etc.). Teams can manage the operations & maintenance of assets, their performance and sustainability from a single interface to deliver new experiences to citizens, new insights to city administrators and operators, and to fulfill the smart city’s vision for creating the Smart Streetlight Operation & Maintenance of tomorrow.
A quick overview of the demo version of the sens-Citilight platform is shown in the illustrative youtube video below –>