Risk identification and impact assessment

Smart City OS - Hull’s journey to becoming a

programmable city

The fifth challenge paper, smart cities, urbanisation and connectivity from Projecting

the Future explores major changes that will inevitably affect project management.

Here’s how Hull is racing to become the UK’s first smart city.

For a city to become smart, it takes a combination of technologies and disciplines,

seamlessly integrated, with an understanding of how a huge number of customers –

the population of your city – with interact with it. In the UK, several cities are racing to

become the nation’s smartest city, from London to Manchester to the country’s

current leader, Bristol.

Against those larger cities, Hull might seem like the underdog, but it’s been making

considerable in-roads over the past 12 months or so. In May last year, it was

awarded £55,000 for smart solutions to reduce traffic congestion. Later in the year, it

started a more ambitious project – to create a purpose-built, smart operating system

(OS) for the city.

The project, Smart City OS is being delivered by Hull City Council, technology

company Connexin and Cisco. Connexin has been working with cities such as

Newcastle Upon Tyne to deliver smart city technologies, impacting on everything

from lighting, mobility, security and waste.

“Developing Hull as a Smart City will give us the opportunity to work with public and

private sector partners to deliver real benefits to communities, businesses and

visitors to Hull,” says Councillor Daren Hale, Deputy Leader of Hull City Council.

The objectives

Hull has been quietly upgrading itself over the past five years. Its small size – with a

population of around 260,000 – has allowed it to make changes at a comparatively

quick pace. This has allowed Hull to become the UK’s first full-fibre city – it has the

fastest broadband of anywhere in the UK, according to broadband choices.

Hull City Council had already worked with Connexin on a long-range wide area

network (LoRaWAN), allowing for better business connectivity and the facility of

Internet of Things devices. Creating its own OS seemed the next logical step.

The aim of the project is to increase and enhance data sharing and decision-making,

allowing the Council to deliver more effective services across the board, from traffic

management to health and social care.

“The system pulls together information that currently sits within separate council

computer systems to enable city-wide management of the city’s public assets in real-

time using state-of-the-art technology, says Hale. “Residents will receive better

information to make choices about transport, traffic and parking. But this will be just

the beginning of what is possible.”

Over the course of the project, it will drive new demand for a digitally skilled

workforce, which will then boost Hull’s economy. The Council is investing in skills for

its young people as a result.

The methodology

The OS uses Connexin tech, built on Cisco Kinetic for Cities platform. It will pull

together 12 separate council IT systems. Each system will process data from a

variety of sources, including city-wide sensors and Internet of Things devices. This

data can be used to help facilitate various services. Connexin, with its experience in

implementing smart city solutions, is taking a five-step process to the installation.

The first step is infrastructure: having the right level of area-wide connectivity to be

able to deliver smart city services. This is a combination of high-speed fibre networks

and LoRaWAN networks. Hull had a head start in this area – local telecoms

company KCOM had invested £85m in the city’s full-fibre network, and Connexin’s

LoRaWAN was already in place.

Second is the installation of sensors across the city, to collect real-time data. This is

where the 12 systems come in. Connexin’s Smart Bins is one of them. The others

include the Siemens Stratos platform for traffic management; the Bartec Auto ID

system for managing waste; and the Datek streetlighting system.

The Vaisala IceCast program will help to predict the weather and plan road

maintenance. The Teletrac Navman provides GPS technology, and the Citilogik

system will monitor people movement. Pitney Bowes is providing asset-management

software for street furniture.

Elsewhere, Defra’s air-quality database, the Environment Agency’s flood monitoring

platform, Hydro-Logic flooding alert sensors and the Astun iShare GIS web mapping

portal – provide the rest of the data.

Stage three is the implementation of the platform and bringing all of the systems onto

the OS. This is expected to take around a year. This allows for stage four – gathering

insights. Stage five is about determining outcomes based on those insights.

“Our platform will enable Hull to become a “programmable city” and move from

outdated siloed service driven technologies to a central platform to improve service

delivery, reduce costs and to make the most of new technologies such as IoT, AI and

machine learning algorithms,” says Furqan Alamgir, Founder and CEO of Connexin.

More about the project

Hull City Council says it’s got the perfect basis for tying together its many nascent or

pilot Smart City projects - a ‘Smart City operating system.

The plan: create a platform to integrate, view, manage and respond to information

from a range of council services, sensors and systems, using a single intelligent

dashboard. Information from current and future data-producing Council work - from

Smart lighting, parking and traffic to waste management and wi-fi projects - are to be

integrated into the “single pane of glass” software platform, which in a year will be

open to residents and businesses.

In terms of cost to do all this, as the city has a claimed “100% fibre” to every

residence and every business in Hull, a lot of the bills for are already covered, as it

has an extensive low-power wide-area network technology (LoRaWAN) network as

the basis. As a result, says the Council, the SmartCity OS is being seen as “relatively

inexpensive for the benefits it will give”.

According to the City Council’s Deputy Leader, Councillor Daren Hale:

Developing Hull as a Smart City will give us the opportunity to work with public

and private sector partners to deliver real benefits to communities, businesses

and visitors to Hull.

Noting that the aim is to enhance data-sharing and decision-making, which will

enable the authority deliver more effective services, including everything from traffic

management to health and social care, Hale adds that this will be just the beginning

of what is possible:

As the project develops, it will create a demand for new digitally-skilled

workforce in the city - so we will need to invest in skills and training for

younger generations so they are prepared for the new types of jobs that will

be created in the digital sector.

Bold

A bold claim, perhaps - but who can blame a civic leader’s enthusiasm about the

potential of new technology? In terms of what’s actually happening on the ground,

Hull is partnering with a local firm called Connexin, which has built the ‘Smart City

OS’ on Cisco's Kinetic for Cities platform.

Bringing together over 70 ‘out of the box’ Cisco certified integrations, Kinect for Cities

is Smart City software that normalises and aggregates data from a range of IoT

sensor types into a set of urban service domains such as waste, lighting and parking.

Essentially, this gives Hull the ability to manage sensors from multiple vendors in

one place, removing the reliance on legacy systems and their associated costs.

Putting all this in context, Assistant Director of Digital and ICT, Mike Kenworthy

explains:

We've been doing elements of Smart Cities - I would say small Smart City

developments. So, for example, we've got an area called Stone Ferry Road,

where we're introducing smart cycle lanes that will sense whether somebody

is getting too close to the traffic and light up, and if the traffic is getting too

close to the cycle lane, it’ll give priority to public transport by recognising the

vehicles. We’re the fourth most congested city in the country, so we link that

data into our traffic management system to move the traffic around more

freely and identify where there is congestion.

We're doing a piece of work on air pollution, so if you link the stuff we're

getting from air pollution to traffic management, you can then see how we can

move traffic to reduce air pollution in certain areas and control it. Linking it to

pieces of work that we've already kind of started, we'll then be able to utilize it

for much more effective results across the city.

The idea is really to get a cohesive way of handling data, whether it's from IoT

(Internet of Things), traffic data, traffic camera information - and deliver all this

data in all its various forms in a uniform way.

But collating all these first-generation Smart City ‘developments’ is just part of the

Smart City OS idea, it turns out. The system will also pull together information that

currently sits within separate Council computer systems to enable city wide

management of the city’s public assets in real time, Kenworthy states:

We'll be integrating about 12 of our back office systems around street scene,

traffic management and waste. Then, there'll be a publicly-facing dashboard

where people, initially, will be able to see things like air quality, traffic flow and

that kind of thing within kind of around a 12 month period, we’re estimating.

But there'll be things that come up during that process that obviously we'll look

at and say ‘OK, actually the benefits of this are such that maybe we should

accelerate it.’ But we need to get the building blocks in place first, and it's a bit

of an unknown quantity on where it'll eventually end because the technology is

changing so fast.

The eventual point of all that data collection, he adds, has to be that it helps the

people of Hull:

If you look at the developments in things like assisted living, we’re going to be

asking how can we use IoT can help us. For example, a motion sensor that

detects whether a fridge door is being opened or closed, and if there's

movement in the house. Now, if you think you've got somebody who is elderly

and living at home and wants to stay at home, you have a great new

opportunity to be able to monitor what's going on, and then be able to if, for

example, say the fridge hasn't opened for 24 hours, you send someone

around to check whether they're okay. It may be that they'd gone away, but

you may find they're actually in some form of distress, but you've intervened

early. You've known about it before it becomes a major problem. One of the

biggest costs within council is adult social care or children's services, so you

can see how avoiding those costs in the future and keeping people living at

home, which is ultimately where they want to live, would be really beneficial.

Ultimately, we are there to deliver the best we can for our citizens and

taxpayers. While most, well probably all, local authorities are under really,

really tight financial pressures, we've got to find ways to continue to improve

the services we deliver, and that's where technology like this comes in, as it is

giving us opportunities to look at new ways of delivering services, new ways of

finding out how we're best going to target our tight resources - and if we can

make decisions that make sure that what we do is actually really effective,

then we're doing the right thing.

Engaging the public and managing stakeholders

While the data will be used by Hull City Council to improve its services across the

board, the aim is to provide insights to businesses and the public too. As the

systems are integrated with the OS, they will be exposed to Hull’s business and

private residents. This, it is hoped, will encourage start-ups to create new

technologies that the city can then pull into its Smart City OS.

“For us, it is not just about smart cities,” says Mike Kenworthy, assistant director of

digital and ICT for Hull City Council, who is managing the project. “We are looking at

utilising IoT and data – that we potentially collect from other sources as well – to find

innovative approaches to any problem.”

One of the biggest challenges for the project is managing the stakeholders, who are

spread across various departments within the council, plus other organisations such

as Humberside Fire and Rescue Service, and the University of Hull.

Hull City Council is taking a ‘one council’ approach to managing it all. People see the

council as ‘the council’ not as a series of separate services. Constant engagement

with stakeholders across all service sectors is crucial.

The end result

Due to its size, strong digital infrastructure, and lessons learned from other smart city

projects, Hull City Council has been able to skip the pilot phase and roll out Smart

City OS across the city. This could potentially cause Hull to leap up the UK smart city

league tables.

Hale and Kenworthy are confident that it will bring considerable economic benefits to

the region, making the city particularly attractive to tech firms. While the council has

a lofty ambition to make Hull the world’s smartest city, the objective is primarily to

benefit the people of the city. “We do not want to be a smart city because it is cool,”

says Kenworthy. “We have to be sure that what we are doing is for the benefit of the

city.”

Brought to you by Project journal.

References

Association for Project management (n.d.). Smart City Os – Hull’s Journey to becoming a

programmable city. APM. Retrieved from https://www.apm.org.uk/resources/find-a-

resource/case-studies/case-study-smart-city-os-hull-s-journey-to-becoming-a-

programmable-city/

Flood, G. (October, 2019). Hull City Council rolls out a Smart City OS to deliver better public

services. Diginomica. Retrieved from https://diginomica.com/hull-city-council-rolls-out-smart-

city-os-deliver-better-public-services