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An Operating System For Cities
CProgrammer98 writes "BBC News reports that cities may soon get their own operating system. From the article: 'The Urban OS works just like a PC operating system but keeps buildings, traffic and services running smoothly. The software takes in data from sensors dotted around the city to keep an eye on what is happening. In the event of a fire, the Urban OS might manage traffic lights so fire trucks can reach the blaze swiftly. The sensors monitor everything from large scale events such as traffic flows across the entire city down to more local phenomena such as temperature sensors inside individual rooms. The OS completely bypasses humans to manage communication between sensors and devices such as traffic lights, air conditioning or water pumps that influence the quality of city life."
Skynet!
City governments cant keep the basics running smoothly. How the hell are they going to maintain a giant sensor network like that?
there are 4 streetlights in my neighborhood that never work right. if they cant get that working, they will never get a complex system working. City governments do not run like a business. Preventative maintenance is not an option.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It sounds like an integration of what's already out there. But when you centralize control, you also centralize failure.
Seen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Genesis_Evangelion ?
That is not an OS in any established or even equivalent sense of the word.
I also predict major driver issues.
This sounds like the Superintendent in Halo ODST.
frog blast the vent core
can we get Doom to run on it?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Politicians and diapers need to be changed frequently and for the same reason. (Who said that? Samuel Clemens? Sounds like something he would have said.)
Why is this not just an application on an existing OS rather than an operating system in it's own right?
Gotta reboot New York...
And it can plug into the facebook API to tell everyone which stoplight you are at!
the way of The Krell
What could possibly go wrong?
So the Blue Screen of Death could really mean death...
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
Can't even afford to keep the firetruck running, how is this going to get deployed?
Seems like a great way for consultants make a fortune doing feasibility studies to me.
All we need is someone to figure out a DDOS on the city (flashmob - everybody press the pedestrian crossing button on 3,2,1...)
Ah. This is obviously some strange usage of the word "OS" that I hadn't previously been aware of.
All of the above can and should be achieved with a de-centralized network of independent nodes (CPU's) that communicate with each other. Right now city traffic management is stuck in the 1950's, something should be done about it, and I don't mean "install traffic light cameras on every friggin intersection" as per Bloomberg.
Ohhh, I see Sid Maier goin' "Ka-ching" on this one....
This thing read like a wet dream. One o/s...monitoring...and controlling....every sensor in the city?
Connected to traffic cameras, traffic lights, building HVAC, lighting systems. That is aware of where fire trucks and law enforcement are? That can give me temperatures on a room-by-room basis? Will it integrate with alarm systems too? Can I use it to monitor lighting and power usage in a room to tell that somebody *really* arrives at 9:03 every day?
Where do I sign up to gain access to the API docs? I want this.
Well...no...really...I want to sell it to somebody with a botnet...but..details.
My wife likes the room hotter, I like it cooler.. she takes shows that would melt paint off of metal, I like mine warm. Centralized control sucks period. Ever been to a place where management sets the heat and you can't change it? They set it at a point to "save money" as well as please whoever is in charge, but for others its too warm or too cold.
This sounds like the Self-Aware Colony in Alpha Centauri.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwqN3Ur-wP0
It'll be something Google comes up with. They've bought wind-power technology, some sort of public transportation program (bikes? buses? I forget), YouTube, which presents the opportunity for expansion into a cable TV-alternative, Google voice. I'm sure a grocery delivery program will be coming. I'm 100 percent convinced GTown isn't far down the line. Based on how Google rolls out products, it would be a beta city, of course. ;)
Bark less. Wag more.
"The OS completely bypasses humans to manage communication between sensors and devices such as traffic lights, air conditioning or water pumps that influence the quality of city life"
--
I can almost hear the theme music to "Terminator"...
It's not an operating system, it's called command and control. And Katia Moskovitch (who wrote that article) has her head up her ass; several cities are doing this already, exactly as described. Anaheim, for example, has an extremely sophisticated system, especially when it comes to monitoring activity and helping first responders deal with things like car accidents, fires and hazardous material incidents. I've seen it, from the control center, and it frankly blew me away...very cool stuff. The real interesting part isn't about the data from the sensors, however; that's almost useless by itself. The real value comes from fusing that data with information that is kept about the nature of things. For example, when a fire breaks out at X place, there's information on hand about what is normally found there. Let's say it's a warehouse...does that warehouse keep anything particularly dangerous in storage, and if so, what kinds of dangers does it pose? That information is there, and can be relayed to the police and firefighters on scene so that they know what they're dealing with.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Surely you want your city in the cloud.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The level of atomic operation required to pull an OS of this level off is unthinkable. It's one thing to manage the input from a computer, it's another to manage a stock exchange but an entire city, that's an entire new level. The biggest question is, what language, I vote Assembler :-)
could have a field day trifling with it.
"If there's a fire alarm on the fifth floor and the elevator is going to the next floor, the light will switch on - but in addition the traffic lights will be switched accordingly to turn the traffic in the right direction so that fire workers can get through".
How long before people actively use their knowledge of how one thing effects another so as to manipulate the system into doing their bidding?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Yes, City OSs already exist. These are the SCADA systems that utilities use to manage their resources. The problem is that these SCADA systems do not manage resources small enough to make the sorts of differences that these pro-city coordinators expect. It is not financially feasible to do it yet.
There is also a myth that a central authority will be staffed with geniuses who will automatically comprehend the situation and make it better. As recent blackouts in Chile showed, however, it is quite possible to be overwhelmed with alarms that no human can sort through.
What good is a boss if he micro-manages everything around?
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Cities and for that matter companies are more than computers. They are people.
They already have "operating systems" to govern their day-to-day behavior. These are laws, bylaws, procedures, employee manuals, best-practices guides, and other formal and informal ways things get done.
Yes, these tie into hardware as well and some of these processes are automated. Traffic signals may be computer-controlled but it is humans using human decision-making that decide what the overall timing patterns will be. Maybe the computer is smart enough to make those decisions itself, but it's still a human who is ultimately responsible for deciding to allow the computer to manage traffic flow and to turn the computer off or tweak its algorithms if things don't work as expected. Who makes this decision and whether that decision is made by a person, by a committee, or by a person following some checklist/human-implemented algorithm is up to the city council or other high-level leadership, who of course are human beings.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What could go wrong?
implies this will happen in european cities, which is actually possible. take California, one of our most progressive states for example. I live in LA, and we cant even keep the streets paved. traffic lights along wilshire routinely pulse and blink on and off at night for no reason. We didnt even get a single competent bike lane until mayor Vilagrosa was run over by a truck on his bike commute to work. America wont see this for 25 years, if ever.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I hope if this is implemented that redundancy is built in along with fail safe operation if power or communications are cut.
Along with single point of failure many opportunities of hacking would need to be addressed.
Nate
Sounds like "The City" (1950) from Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man"
Cobol, man. No way anybody would do that in assembly.
Rethinking email
A single point of control isn't always a good idea when dealing with humans.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Cities Of the future:
iCity (the new big Apple) will charge double the taxes to residents, a very intuitive way of manoevering the city. No private enterprise will be allowed- the city must run everything.
Kindleville, will charge half the taxes, but not many public services.
Microsoftopolis will be a huge sprawling city- that once had a decent idea, that it stole from iCity. The city will try to do everything, and do badly at most things.
Googolia will be a tax free haven- but every thing you look do or say will be sent to marketers and the streets will one big billboard.
Then there is Linux Angeles, taxes will be low, the city will do more for you, if you know how to get around. The only problem is, every facet of your life will be overly complicated and you will be forced to worship a giant penguin.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It will only work on Windows 95 and will be written in VisualBASIC with a FoxPro database. Backups will be done by shutting the system down and copying files onto a Zip disk.
Oh look! A City version of UAC!
"We detected a street light out of synch. Do you want to synch it? Cancel or Allow?"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
With due respect to the marketing folks behind Urban OS, it reality the engineering is actually going in the direction of passing useful information through the network to a variety of embedded computers who then make such decisions as granting priority to a firetruck.
I have been developing software such as this for quite a while, and it simply makes a lot more sense to tell, for instance, a traffic controller directly that a city bus is on the way than it does to tell a centralized system that a bus is on the way and have it command a traffic controller. The traffic controller is the "expert system", developed by people who know what it is supposed to be doing. It just needs data to do it's job.
On that last point, sensor failures are the reason most intelligent traffic controllers fail to do their job correctly, and the more sensors you have, the higher the percentage of failed sensors in the system. You need to solve that problem first, before you worry about what CPU the solution is running on.
When a handful of messages with single corrupted bits can take down S3, how long do you think systems will keep running at the corner of Corrupt-Politician Street and Lowest-Bidder-Construction Boulevard?
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
Anaheim, for example, has an extremely sophisticated system, especially when it comes to monitoring activity and helping first responders deal with things like car accidents, fires and hazardous material incidents.
Thank Disneyland and Major League Baseball. Between these two there must have been a lot of homeland security dollars available for such a system. I guess the US taxpayer deserves some thanks as well.
OK the above is somewhat exaggerated. I used to work in Anaheim and I also recall some effort to run fiber optic all over the place long before 9/11. So there was also a symbiotic modernization effort that supported the above.
Now all that remains is to integrate this with Sim City...
But will it run Crysis?
I like the technological aspect of networked sensors and remote management, I intend to put sensors in my own home, but I can't get over how annoying this article is.
An article full of hand-waving is topped with this:
"And this is what Urban OS is providing, this kind of solution to analyse mass data, enter it in a context and perform magical actions."
The cutesy use of computing terms is grating:
"To support the myriad of different devices in a city the firm has developed an extensive set of application services that will run Urban OS, dubbed PlaceApps - the urban environment equivalent of apps on a smartphone."
"The OS completely bypasses humans to manage communication between sensors and devices such as traffic lights, air conditioning or water pumps that influence the quality of city life."
What previous problem is solved by having the city "OS" manage my air conditioning? Do I use too much? Should I put sensors in my house so UrbanOS can tell if nobody's home, then shut it off for me?
Frankly I'm not comfortable with the degree of centralization implied in this article. The folks who run infrastructure already have or are installing ever more networked sensors to ease maintenance, administration, and lower maintenance costs.
I get the feeling the article writer and McLaren Electronic Systems have very different things in mind.
You will regret this!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
(actually references)
To see how this might turn out, please see:
"Return of the Archons"
"The Apple"
"For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky"
Go into a lot of business like Target, Walmart, etc. Corporate central offices control the heating and AC. So even when there are cronic years long issues with sections of buildings being badly controlled (roasting temps at the checkout lanes) there is zero local control.
Scale this up to a city and...
1. Nothing like having to submit a bug report once basic functions get buried in million+ lines of code, like say a traffic light that keeps malfunctioning and causing crashes.
2. Utter chaos when the town Blue Screens.
3. Bad interaction with other systems, like train controls that the city does not have control over (there are already problems here, but at least they can be resolved with modest code bases between two local controllers, not with a mega OS sized chunk of software).
Basically, small local stuff might be less efficient, but by far it is more fault tolerant and robust to failure.
This could save a lot of money currently paid to city employees doing the same job. And, for this reason, it is a non-starter in most contemporary democracies with unionized government-workers.
Remember, when NYC's subways wanted to replace one out of two people currently manning some of the trains with better electronics? The unions -- supported by many of others in the Left-leaning city -- raised such a ruckus, that the agency backed off...
The illogic of "we need subways to employ more people, not less", however Luddite in nature, prevailed...
Single point of failure for a city. Great. Single system to compromise too; should be an attractive target for Bad Guys(tm).
I remember when RFID came out and there was a commercial with a guy walking through a supermarket stuffing things into his oversized coat like a very bad shoplifter and he walks out and is automatically charged for everything thanks to RFID and having his card on file. Everyone talked about how cool that was and how great it would be. That lasted about a two weeks, then the FUD started. If you don't know what the backlash was, just read the comments of the attached video.
The same thing would happen with this proposal. People would think it is a great idea, then FUD would start. People would worry about being tracked, privacy, etc. And, the backlash would begin.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Out of curiosity, isn't this exactly the sort of thing you're supposed to be doing with Puppet/CFengine/Chef/Bcfg2? I mean, to keep things running smoothly in a system you're looking to manage its configuration. If the city is a system then why not just create a "node" for each building, street, and so forth and use one of the aforementioned tools to manage it? I can't even imagine it'd be too hard, especially with Puppet due to its modular nature. Something I'm missing?
"Just a fox, a whisper."
Yep boring already exists. Poor sales piece for the company selling this so called OS. I think most /.ers would cream their pant if they saw a real C&C system.
"You all going to die down here."
.. to the wonderful pen testing opportunity!
I do security
not if you trun on no disasters then put fire at 0%
I for one welcome our robot overlords!
Cities already (with sufficient infrastructure and maintenance) work pretty well. What special advantage is there to networking everything? Buildings are designed to mitigate fire, explosion, and all sorts of nasty things. Traffic lights can already be switched by fire trucks, etc. Why does it have to be any more sophisticated?
Actually, there's a user sitting at a screen with UAC pop-ups:
"Do you want to allow the following driver through this intersection? Yes | No"
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
If a city operating system wasn't open source. I wouldn't want a city's future pinned to a single company's competence, nor would I trust any one company with having that much power. If we can't trust the private sector with our PlayStations, what makes us think that we can trust them with our traffic lights?
Next step: City as a Service (CAAS), and thousands of MBAs trying to convince goverments to outsource their cities "to the cloud!"
"and the State and Local governments can't agree who owns what road. A sensor system would blow their minds."
please submit evidence that They have MINDS that can be blown.
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Please tell me that it is NOT Microsoft else some people are in deep sh**!
... It's likely to be:
* Overpriced
* Underthought
* ^-- + Underdeveloped
* ^-- + + Bloated
* Insecure
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
A graet SF book of the computer systems interconnecting and helping each other, then to discover that humans are running around in the environment.
There's an architecture for this. It's awful. It's an approach to real-time control designed by web people. They want to use Cisco routers to talk to actuators, so that remote applications can operate the actuators. That's just wrong.
The right way to do this involves most control being very local, with some data flowing up to a higher level for supervision and some commands flowing down. Better designs can operate with the higher level supervision off line, at some loss of performance.
An example of this is an advanced HVAC system for a medium to large building. Return air ducts for each room are equipped with sensors that measure temperature, humidity, CO, CO2, and smoke. (Humidity and CO2 give a measure of how many occupants are in the room. More people require more airflow. Empty rooms require very little airflow. This is a huge win for hotels and classroom buildings, where the people load varies widely.) These talk to a local controller for part of the building, which can control local dampers and fans. It talks to the building HVAC controller, which controls the heaters, chillers, outside air vents, and has some sensors of its own. This in turn may talk to a remote building management system, to report units that need repair, fuel consumption and availability, and other management data. It's not unusual to outsource this, usually to a company that handles maintenance.
But the remote building management system does not directly control actuators. It may set some policy parameters, or order some units off line. The "urban OS" people are proposing a much more centralized system. That has much more potential for large scale failure.
I know there is a lot of software available for municipalities but I'm wondering if there is a market for a complete stack standard software from the OS up. Despite FUD about Munich's Linux move, it is saving the city huge amounts of money in licensing fees now that it is in use.
What city wouldn't be excited about a full stack of software that would be secure, single-source and relatively complete?
Never mind, piddly little humans... just go where I tell you to. That's right... goooooood people, right into those innocuous looking little pods.
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Skynet is inevitable! q:)
http://www.gibby.net.au
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