Aussie partners team up with Cisco in million-dollar smart city project

Author: Leon Spencer, Head of News, ARN
Source publication: ARN – Click to view on source website

The project is aimed at helping to reduce traffic congestion in the South Australian capital.

Local partners Data^#3 and QuantumIT have joined forces with the likes of Cisco, SQLstream, Quanergy, Astrata and Bartco Visual Information Systems on a major smart city technology pilot in Adelaide.

The project is aimed at helping to reduce traffic congestion in the South Australian capital and create the foundations for the deployment of autonomous vehicles on busy roads. It is also being used as a test case for technology designed to support the use of autonomous vehicles.

The pilot, which Cisco claims to have pumped no less than $1 million into the project, is built on its internet of things (IoT) operations platform, Kinetic for Cities, designed to tap into data from billions of connected devices.

Undertaken in partnership with the South Australian Government and the City of Adelaide, the pilot program sees the rollout of technology that will measure the dwell time and queue length of vehicles as they wait at an intersection.

The system also calculates rolling averages across the day via a customised dashboard and a suite of metrics aimed at providing insight into how well the traffic light sequences are operating at any given intersection.

Cisco said the pilot is being split into two phases; the first phase sees six sensors set up at the busy intersection of Grenfell and Pulteney, in the Adelaide CBD.

The sensors gather intersection-approach traffic information, including location and speed of vehicles as well as pedestrians. The information is then run through algorithms to fine-tune traffic light timing to improve traffic and pedestrian crossing flow.

The second phase of the pilot involves an assessment of whether the same infrastructure can be applied to determine the location and movements of autonomous vehicles – a factor that is critical to being able to manage, direct and control autonomous vehicles, according to Cisco.

Following the trial, which is currently underway, other intersections in Adelaide will be selected to potentially test and scale the solution city-wide followed by a national roll-out.

The pilot comes roughly three years after Cisco named Adelaide as a “Lighthouse City” in the Cisco Smart+Connected Communities program, sponsored by Adelaide City Council and the Government of South Australia.

Cisco subsequently revealed in late 2015 the next phase in its project to make Australia a global leader in developing smart city projects, with the launch of Adelaide’s Smart City Studio.

In November last year, Cisco introduced its City Infrastructure Financing Acceleration Program — a US$1 billion program aimed to drive the adoption of technologies to transform cities and their communities.