The City of Syracuse was named the State of New York’s flagship Smart City in (2019). This means that the City pursues different ways to integrate technology through the “internet of things” or IoT into the way it does business. For many smart city projects, city staff utilize highly efficient sensors in different locations to collect data that informs different policies or procedures. For example, a meter that tracks water levels could be set up in Onondaga Creek to let the Water Department know when flooding is starting to occur. Because of the external costs entailed in deploying smart technology (geography, weather, budget constraints, etc.), it is often thought of that becoming a smart city is cost prohibitive. In this case, however, the team’s implementation decommissions an alternative platform – saving the city $34,000 per year.
As part of the Syracuse Surge strategy, the City is making efforts to upgrade its technological capabilities to be more responsive to events and developments in a more efficient manner. One program the City has been working on is deploying sensors in vacant properties across the City that monitor and detect things like motion, heat, and smoke among other things. This enables the City to know when people or animals might start to occupy vacant properties, which can be dangerous for them and the community when fires are started for warmth which lead to house fires.
Our three summer interns pictured (on the left) with the City’s Smart City Manager (right).
This past summer, three interns from the On Point for College program joined the API team and collaborated with the Mayor’s Office of Strategic Initiatives to help build a software-based tool that can decode the signals that are sent by devices which have been deployed throughout the city as part of the Syracuse Surge. Harun Mohamed of Colgate University, Abdulrahman Shaalan of Syracuse University, and Hibatullah Shaalan of Columbia University – all local students from the Syracuse area – made a significant impact under the leadership of Vincent Scipione to build a pipeline of data connecting digital infrastructure housed in the City to the various sensors and monitors out in the field. This required them to write code that would translate the meter readings from the field, which can look something like an abstract piece of data “010010010101A0101” into a useful bit of information like “July 10, 12:00:00, no motion at 233 East Washington Street detected” (just as an example).
The decoding is required because smart city sensors are often calibrated to send signals via LoRaWan, which stands for Long Range Wide Area Network. Cities use this type of network for many reasons instead of WiFi or Cellular networks, some of them being because it requires less power, has greater reach over a larger geographic area, and can handle the hundreds of devices which make up the network without significant cost or lag-time. But LoRaWan’s advantage requires lower fidelity data transmissions, in 0s and 1s as in the above example, which requires us to decode it. This was done in the platform IoT Central – which is part of Microsoft’s Azure tool for developing custom applications – we are able to centralize data translation into useable information via a decoding process built out by the OnPoint team of interns.
LoRaWan image citation: What are LoRa and LoRaWAN? | The Things Network
This cross departmental team integrated and improved a city developed system that enables significant cut savings and future flexibility to further integrate our own resources by building a tool via Microsoft Azure; a more resilient set of tools that costs less money and provided a great experience for the team involved. So, we can build upon our own success rather than relying on outside tools or vendors, saving time and money and down the line on solutions and products that might not be a perfect fit for what we’re looking to do, and might not be as responsive as we need.
This work will be capped of by finalizing an in-house dashboard that integrates smart meter data and translates it into usable information for city management by different departments – which don’t require them to know how to code in order to understand the data. The team is able to do this by creating our functions within IoT Central which retrieve device data and decode it into useable information for our KPI dashboard. Then collect it for long term storage and efficient historical record which can be used to detect other issues and effectively manage problems within the city.
This summer was an excellent example of how working with community partner organizations like On Point, and effective collaboration between City departments can provide worthwhile opportunities for young professionals to demonstrate their skills on priority projects that drive long-term value and operational improvements for the City.