NEC Cloud and IoT platform launches automate smart city management and control

NEC Iberica, a wholly owned subsidiary of NEC Europe, today launched a new version of its smart city product offering, the Cloud City Operation Center (CCOC) after successfully demonstrating it at the recent Smart City Expo World Congress. NEC's CCOC product is based on the "Core platform of the Future Internet" (FIWARE) project, which provides open API and generic enablers to realize the vision of a future internet platform.

For years, many cities have deployed Machine to Machine (M2M) sensors to improve the efficiency of transport, lighting, irrigation and waste collection services, in order to increase public safety levels by minimizing pollution and waste. The sensors are then connected to NEC's CCOC which uses NEC's big data analysis platform to collect and process mass M2M data.

"The new Cloud City Operation Center allows cities to truly manage, interpret and automate responses to the data collected across the city," said Jose Luis Mate, CTO and Deputy Head of the Cloud Convergence Business Unit (CCBU) at NEC EMEA. "Collecting the data is only one element in the process. Managing the data is vital and our operation center does that, allowing cities to intelligently relate to situations and, where appropriate, citizens."

The operation center's dashboard enables KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to be quickly cross-referenced and visualized. This dashboard has been improved to represent not only the data, but also to add value by interpreting the information obtained. It can make predictions based on a wide range of environmental parameters, including temperature, pollen count, noise, carbon monoxide and ambient light levels. For example, it not only represents the pollution level in a specific place and at a specific time, but now it can compare to other time zones and indicate whether there is a traffic jam generating an alert in the dashboard.

In addition, this new version of CCOC uses specialized CCTV (Closed Circuit Television), which is able to analyze video filmed by security cameras in a city to recognize objects and record their actions in real time. The behavior of detected objects is automatically analyzed and compared with behavior patterns preconfigured for the scene filmed, in order to alert city operators.

The applications of this new feature are numerous. For example, indoor cameras can alert operators about peak hours at train or bus stations and terrorist acts at airports. Additionally, outdoor cameras can warn of issues such as double-parked cars, vehicles traveling in the wrong direction or exceeding the speed limit, or intrusions into private areas. Cities can create new smart services that their citizens want to actively use and engage in.

The CCOC solution is also able to reduce the work load at monitoring centers, by automating the public analysis of cities, and by reducing the public operational costs using technology to crunch and visualize the data, while city planners can focus on taking decisions for the public welfare.