The heart of smart infrastructures
When we are thinking of potential Next Generation technology Infrastructure, could be several topics; however, immediate next in mind is the one related to building a future for Smart Cities.
The smart cities refer to an overall blueprint for city designs considering the mid and long-term sustainable future. The population moving to urban areas is expected to grow to more than fifty percent in the next four to five years. Work with that growth takes more than just simple urban planning; it will add energy and climate-related challenges; then, cities that are technology and efficient resources driven, are extremely necessary to solve those challenges.
One of the smart city's goals is to add technology infrastructure to help manage many of those complexities. Pertinent applications domain namely: natural resources, energy sources, transportation modes, buildings, the living government between others, are related to current smart city initiatives such as water and air pollution management, green energy sources and management, Real ID deployment, internet connectivity systems among others.
Today’s cities are complex systems that are characterized by massive numbers of interconnected citizens, businesses, different modes of transport, communication networks, services, and utilities. The commonality is the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), a topic that in an urban arena, helps cities make better use of their resources.
There are a significant number of parameters that assist to build city infrastructure. The most common parameters for monitoring of cities infrastructures are listed as physical, mechanical, chemical between others. Then, a variety of sensors able to measure those parameters can be deployed in large numbers across a city infrastructure for precise monitoring.
Lately, fiber optic sensing based on fiber backbone network architecture is at the heart of smart infrastructures providing all communications between sensor networks and with the ability to monitor and act intelligently. Using fiber sensing networks to monitor public infrastructures, such as bridges, roads, utilities, buildings, provides awareness that enables more efficient use of resources, based on the data collected by those sensors interconnected.
The immediate benefit, real-time monitoring; it will assist with better-scheduled inspections, therefore reducing costs; or related to energy, measuring energy consumption in buildings allows for accurate load forecasting as well as better space usage; or looking for transport systems, sensors deployed along roads for traffic monitoring would be able to collect data which is necessary for an appropriate intelligent transportation systems (ITS). For these approaches to be effective, sensors must be deployed in very large numbers and they must be interconnected with fiber-optic networks so that the collected data can be sent to a central information system, where intelligent decisions based on this data can be made.
The evolution of technology is significant, and it will play a major role in advanced fiber optic sensing, as also the evolution of hardware required for sensing applications will certainly be driven by these technological advances. Challenges, parameters, applications, benefits mentioned above require a holistic approach to be implemented in a city successfully, which needs to involve a multi-disciplinary collaboration. Then, all those, are a great advancement for smart city business opportunities, especially for safer city solutions. In a world where carbon emissions must be reduced for sustainable environments, there are still a lot of challenges to be work and we are confident cutting-edge solutions mentioned here will provide meaningful new value for fiber optic sensing networks.