But what exactly does getting ‘smarter’ mean and is it always a good thing if hackers are now rubbing their hands as their vectors of attack proliferate?
We put these and similar questions to Brian McGuigan, European commercial director of smart cities and lighting at Silver Spring Networks, which helps global utilities and cities connect, optimise and manage smart energy and smart city infrastructure with its smart-grid network products.
Cities using Silver Spring technology include Bristol, Glasgow, Crossmolina in the West of Ireland, Westminster in London and Copenhagen, among others across Europe, North America and Asia.
IFSEC Global: Hi, Brian. Please tell us a bit about Silver Spring Networks and your role in the company?
Brian McGuigan: In the utility space, which is where we started as a business, we connected everything: smart meters, electricity, water and gas, but also the smart grid assets like substation monitors, solar panels, wind farms… And devices in people’s homes.
We’ve grown to be the market leader in energy networks in markets like the US, Australia, New Zealand and others, so I think we connect over 40% of the US smart grid for example.
“Smart cities are actually more of a process than a destination”
About four or five years ago we started to explore how the same technology, the same platform, would apply to cities. We found that, actually, the underlying technology was similar but the commercial structure, the partnerships, were quite different.
On the cities side we connect everything from intelligent street lighting to traffic control signals or environmental sensors. And that’s a growing list as cities explore the services they want to innovate or improve.
I look specifically at the cities side of the business across Northern Europe. So I work with cities to roll out a particular application or explore how they can experiment and bring companies together to find innovative solutions for challenges they’re facing.
IG: How would you define a smart city?
BM: It’s constantly evolving. What’s interesting is the leading global cities – including several in the UK – I don’t think any would describe themselves as smart yet. The more they do, the more they uncover new challenges or areas they’d like to improve.
So I actually see smart cities more as cities that reinvent themselves in a process of ongoing innovation. That’s largely driven by the change in the pace of technology development.
So there might only have been one or two large-scale innovations in the career of a lighting engineer, for example, whereas now we’re in a much faster cycle of innovation. So cities are having to change the way they buy technology and collaborate across the city.
“We’ve always participated in the growth of standards, because broadly we think standards have been shown to win in every market”
So I see the smart city initiatives as really reflected by that process of cities reinventing their processes, to benefit from emerging technology and tackling challenges like climate change, the knock-on implications of carbon monitoring and reduction, increased congestion and all with simultaneously shrinking budgets.
So I think smart cities are actually more of a process than a destination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIeDX6kZUQo
IG: And data is a big part of everything you’ve described isn’t it?
BM: The first part is generally the data collection. Most of these systems are two-way. Even the simplest of sensors have a two-way component.
So there’s gathering data from devices but also managing devices so they stay safe, secure and operational. And that’s why we have a communication platform with a very robust and reliable communication out to these devices, optimised for machine-to-machine communication.
Primarily we’re a very standard-focused business. We’ve always leveraged existing standards and participated in the growth and update of those standards, because broadly we think standards have been shown to win in every market.
As a market matures it moves to standards, so from the outset we really try and drive a standards-based process.
On the communication side of smart cities the standard that’s most important to us is the Wi-SUN mesh standard, which is kind of analogous to Wi-Fi.
This is an international standard with hundreds of members that allows interoperability of devices at a wireless level, but specifically designed for large-scale outdoor mesh networks. So it’s got specific capabilities around built-in redundancy and resilience for high levels of reliability in these outdoor networks.
It’s got a built-in intelligence so devices will automatically manage which neighbours they channel through and lots of technical aspects that make it well suited to outdoor applications where the leaves on trees will come and go with seasons and buildings will be built and knocked down over a multiple-year cycle. The networks need to be somehow organic to deal with that.
And once data comes in it must be accessible to all potential users in the city.
We have a smart-city platform called SLV6 and that’s an interface that different departments use to either manage devices in the field or understand the data coming from them. That could be the person managing your street lighting networks, detecting where faults are, optimising routes to repair those, or someone managing your electric car fleet.
It has tools for asset management: where are our devices, what state are they in… But it also has a data analytics capability to identify issues or make future decisions.
It’s a flexible platform with open APIs, which means cities that choose this platform don’t have to rely on you; they can get applications from other suppliers too.
We also often share data with other systems. To pick an example, Glasgow’s future city demonstrator initiative had this SLV6 platform to manage streetlights, with data from traffic sensors, air quality sensors and noise centres. That data was then shared with the city open data platform, which helps citizens understand how their city works.
It brought in data for lots of feeds, including ours, but we also shared data into the city’s traffic management system and operations centre. So it gave a layer of control to CCTV operators, so if there was a traffic accident they could turn up the lights on the street to help first responders.
Cities are more and more looking at these systems as an integrated web where data can be shared and used across systems. We think that is very important, because the value of, say, monitoring road surface temperature for an application like road gritting, it might be that data could also help inform the local buildings manager to understand the likelihood that pipes might have frozen in buildings around the estate.
So I think we’ll see more reuse of data rather than it being vertical. And as a result we’re expecting to integrate our system with an ever growing list of other systems.
IG: And how does cyber security inform your thinking and discussions with clients?
BM: We started in the utility market where security is really priority number one. The bar set for security when you’re providing connectivity to a hub station, or even smart meter data in people’s homes, is very high.
So we’ve a lot of experience and capability there. Five or six years ago we formed a forum where we brought all our utility customers together in the US and they have now created an ongoing group where compare notes on security vulnerabilities and concerns.
We see tenders for perhaps 20,000 lights, all connected on a wireless system, and the only mention of security in the tender document is that the document must have a password
So that’s very mature as a conversation, and we see ourselves as leaders in smart-grid security. We’ve got 24 million devices deployed and there’s never been any compromise. But that’s an ongoing process, clearly.
But there really is a very limited level of awareness and discussion with cities. Very often we’re trying to educate them on the importance of that.
If a city has an IT department then they probably come to us with a very good understanding of security. I don’t know the exact figure, but from my observations probably only 15% of local authorities have an IT department though. Even some big cities don’t have an IT department – they don’t have a CTO or CIO. So there’s no consistency in how they approach security.
Take intelligent lighting as an example. Of all the smart city badged applications, smart lighting is rolling out at the fastest scale, because so many cities are transferring lights over from old light sources to LEDs because of major energy savings and they take that opportunity to roll out a control system as well.
We still see tenders for perhaps 20,000 lights, all connected, on a wireless system, and the only mention of security in the tender document is that the document must have a password – because that’s all they know about. And there’s a reluctance.
I’m not a security expert, but many cities don’t have the capability at the moment so it feels like they ignore the question. It will probably take a few bad examples of cities being hacked through one service or another before it becomes a recognised priority.
IG: Have you got any specific projects that you could talk about in terms of lessons learned or really profound changes in how the city functions?
BM: A project has rolled out in Copenhagen over the last couple of years. They updated 20,000 lights and rolled out a flexible network they could use for a much broader case of use cases.
In parallel they’ve looked at how they can leverage the infrastructure to enhance and extend the benefits. They have an intelligent transport stream looking at how they can upgrade their transport assets and systems to try and address underlying challenges, from congestion to air quality to…
There’s a big initiative to increase cycling. They already lead Europe: they have something like 45% of journeys done by bike, and the target is 60%.
They recognised there was a bit of a contradiction between turning lighting down late at night to save energy and the initiative to promote more cyclists on the road. Obviously turning lights down might not be good for cycle safety.
So they’ve put in place a mechanism through a series of sensors, connecting the traffic control system into the same system as the lights. When cyclists set off from traffic lights, the lights above them go bright for 10 or 15 seconds, so they’ll be visible to cyclists that might otherwise not have seen them and jumped the lights.
This was a use case not considered at all when they were buying the system, but because they built in flexibility it’s been straightforward for us to integrate with the traffic control system. And because we have the mesh capability with peer-to-peer capabilities, we now have sensors connecting to the traffic signal controller, then sending commands straight to the local lights very quickly. So you can have that feedback cycle.
So what they’re expecting to do is add value over time. A few years ago a ‘smart’ lighting system really just meant gaining energy savings through a dimming schedule and by optimising maintenance routes. Now it’s a tool that can improve over time.
IG: Are there any other security benefits or implications for the work you do?
BM: Crime reduction is often included in the additional benefits of upgraded lighting, but it’s a hard thing to measure, because there’s so many other factors. So it is the reason though that we see a push towards lighting systems with an adaptive or dynamic nature.
You will have sensors watching footpaths, and if someone is walking along they will turn the lights up.
Some cities have told us that the reason they want a control system is not because they expect to make regular changes, but if there’s an accident in a particular area they want to be able to change the lighting schedule in that area before there’s a second accident.
Similarly, in Glasgow they wanted to really use it to help first responders in the event of an accident. That could apply to any emergency scenario where they want to increase lighting.
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