Smart Sewers: Monitoring through Geographic Information System (GIS) Technology, in Massachusetts, USA: During the winter storm of 2015, the blizzard crippled the sewer system of the Plum Island, a barrier Island, which is located off northeast coast of Massachusetts. The Mayor of the city of Newburyport, who is responsible forproviding water and sewer services to the residents of Plum Island, together with other departments, came up with aninnovative solution in the form of sewer monitoring technology to locate sewer system issues. Thegeographical information system (GIS) technology installed by them has allowed to track every component related to sewer system and hence eased the identification of the trouble occurring within the system. The use of GIS technology has not only helped save time, but has become an effective model of monitoring and maintenance of sewer systems in other municipal bodies around the world to follow.

Water supply network leakage reduction program: Pula, Croatia: Municipal authorities around the world have been compelled to rethink on their strategies to attain water balance owing to growing water demands, scarcity of water, environmentally sustainable considerations and so on. In the city of Pula, Croatia, the municipal body has designed a water supply network leakage reduction program as a measure to reduce water loss and thereby help attain water balance. As one of the key parts of the strategy, remote monitoring and leakage reduction measures GIS technology has been incorporated.While on the one hand, this system utilizes the database on the volumes of the water consumed by the households to simulate water pressure and water service interruptions, on the other, it is viable in mapping the plans to carry out renovation and construction work on the water pipe network.

Smart Bins, A real time solution for waste management: Amsterdam, the Netherlands:

Amsterdam has adopted the usage of smart bins equipped with sensor technology and solar powered compactor bins as a smart waste management solution. One of the many advantages of this initiative is that it communicates information on fill level to users to ensure waste collection only when required. It also helps in lessening the collection trips and reduces the traffic interruption caused due to collection visits. Thus, it contributes in improving the street sanitation.

Networking Alba Iulia for Smart Living:

Alba Iulia Smart City, situated in the Central Romania has used tourism and strong partnerships with private companies to transform itself into Romania’s first smart city. While many cities focus on implementing smart solutions involving transport and networking, Alba lulia took innovative step of channelizing the EU funds to find solutionsfor strengthening the city’s brand and its most important industry, i.e., tourism. As a way forward, Alba lulia carried out significant technological up-gradation in partnership with private companies like Orange Romania, Romanian Direct One and Syswin Solutions. The initiative taken by the Smart City is as follows:Set up a secure 4G/4G + wireless network with 229 hotspots across the city, including points on public transport and thereafter Bluetooth Low Energy connections to the network were leveraged to run ‘e-Albalulia’. The e-Albalulia serves as an interactive electronic city guide which assist visitors in exploring the city and participate in treasure hunting. This initiative also provides visitors information about offer deals at local bars and restaurants, local events to support the local business. The e-Albalulia further acts as a channel for the citizens to provide feedbacks on certain issues.  

Sensor-led crowd management, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain: The Sagrada Familia, is one of the main tourists’ sites in Barcelona, with huge number of visitors visiting the Catholic Church. Therefore, the city of Barcelona together with Mobile World Capital Barcelona and local network operator Orange has been working on monitoring the number of the visitors to this tourist site. A series of mobile-enabled sensors around the Sagrada Familia has been installed to track the number of visitors and understand their movements to ensure safety concerns.

Deployment of Air quality sensorsin Royal Borough of Greenwich, London:

Improving air quality is a key concern for many cities with gaseous and particular emissions from vehicles and industry leading to public health problem. As a result, therefore, cities first need to have information on the pollution hotspots and the cause of the pollution generated to control the emissions and for up-keeping the air quality. The Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA) is working with the Royal Borough of Greenwich on air quality initiatives and has developed utilizing mobile, Internet of Things and Big Data technologies, to improve the public health prospects. Simultaneously, it is providing important information to city administers to implement new solutions and insights to assure success of the initiative.

Rejuvenating public spaces, Adelaide in Australia: Adelaide City Council kept place-making at the core of its effort in engaging with the public. It therefore, rejuvenated its public spaces by incorporating innovative and inexpensive place-making strategies to make the city livelier.

Creating Startup Ecosystem, Oslo in Norway:The Oslo municipality has undertaken an initiative tofoster a dialogue between the city authorities and the startup ecosystem. For this, it has built the SmartOslo Accelerator in collaboration with the start-up communities for solving smart city challenges. It has enabled the knowledge sharing easier, reliable and quicker between the city authority and startup communities.