Western Parkland Councils collaborate aborate to create a connected smart city o create a connected smart city

In order to measure population growth, and the impact of development and urban growth on the environment the eight councils have established the Western Parkland City Sensor Network Project.

This has created a shared, scalable sensing network, data sharing platform, and data governance processes across the eight Western Parkland Councils.

Ensuring that sensor data was available both internally and externally via open data portals was key to project success. Following a full market evaluation the Western Parkland Councils chose the Huwise data sharing platform. This was deployed by Huwise partner Peclet Technology alongside the Ubidots Internet of Things (IoT) management platform.

Data is now collected from a range of sensors:

• Environmental sensors, measuring soil moisture, air quality, weather stations, thermal cameras, water quality and noise levels.

• Movement and counting technologies, including people/device counters, CCTV and thermal cameras.

The project includes a focus on specific areas. These include:

• Environmental sensing to measure water quality in the upper South Creek catchment and Hawkesbury, and to measure air quality, heat and noise in Liverpool and Campbelltown central business districts (CBDs).

• Public domain sensing to measure the movement of people, vehicles and bicycles in Penrith, Katoomba, Liverpool and Picton city centers.

• Smart governance through a coordinated approach between all councils to implement interoperable technologies, and a common IoT and open data platform and associated data governance processes.

• Data analytics, provided by the University of New South Wales and University of Wollongong.

• Communication and engagement by sharing all collected data via engaging open data platforms.

Our project is now collecting over 4 million data points every month, across over 180 datasets. This is then shared internally and made publicly available via APIs and dashboards. It is shared through eight data portals, one for each individual council and an overall project portal.

All data is also reused at the state government level in the New South Wales Government digital twin.

Although the network sensor project was initially focused on specific areas, usage has already grown. For example, Campbelltown City Council is using the data sharing platform to collect all utilities, fuel and waste data and build a Carbon Inventory to track its progress towards carbon neutrality. Another council is connecting council fleet electric vehicle charging data, while Penrith and Camden have used the open data platform to publish useful data to citizens ahead of council elections. Two other councils are conducting transparency initiatives and working on sharing Corporate Strategy implementation metrics to the public.

The project demonstrates the value of collecting data via a wide range of IoT sensors to give a comprehensive view of the environment and area. Building on this data, the 8 councils are now creating additional IoT use cases to support the aims of monitoring the impact of development and better serving citizens.

The Western Parkland City Sensor Network Project relies on the Huwise platform for data sharing and visualization. Implemented by Peclet Technology, the solution collects data from the sensor networks and then publishes and shares information across a range of data portals, ready to be used internally and externally.

The project uses three key Huwise features in particular:

Huwise architected its solution on AWS as an IaaS and leveraged AWS’s comprehensive, secure, scalable, and cost-effective portfolio of services, including Amazon RDS, Amazon Elb, Amazon ElastiCache. This allowed Western Parkland Councils to gain maximum value from its data sharing project with Huwise as part of its sensor-based Smart City initiative.

The project’s success is allowing our eight councils to meet three key objectives:

• Minimizing environmental impact by monitoring over 4 million monthly data points, enabling the measurement of future development impacts.

• Maximizing the return of economic development initiatives by collecting people, vehicle and bicycle counting/movement data in 41 different locations. This enables councils to measure the effectiveness of projects.

• Streamlining council operations and enhancing service to customers. Councils are now sharing over 180 datasets between themselves, with an ongoing program of collaboration to identify new initiatives.

Thanks to its success the project has been recognized through multiple awards. It has won in the Smart Cities category at the 2021 IoT Awards and is now a finalist in the local government category at the 2022 iTnews Benchmark Awards.