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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."
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.
That is not an OS in any established or even equivalent sense of the word.
I also predict major driver issues.
Arguably, much of the interest in centralization seems to be a mixture of telcom, database, and analytics outfits looking for a problem to which they have a solution in stock, along with an e-penis competition among municipal and emergency services types about who can have the coolest "Command Center" with the biggest vector-art map of the city at the front, and the most uniformed people Looking Serious at banks of monitors.
This sort of problem is one where a distributed systems approach is overwhelmingly more sensible(unless your primary interests are selling system integration and/or conducting surveillance), and often already in effect.
For instance, in many cities, you will see a small sensor unit mounted somewhere on the traffic-light structures(distinguishable by a little tubular sun-shade thing). That device is there to pick up coded IR pulses emitted by emergency vehicles with their emergency lighting activated and deviate from the usual traffic light pattern in favor of giving them priority at the intersection.
There you go. A few cheap sensors, interacting with local stimuli and control systems, produces the broad-level effect you want. Works great in biological systems as well.
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.
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"People are always attributing things to Mark Twain that I never actually said."
--Mark Twain
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
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.
I'll be petitioning the local government to rename my street:
Main Street'); DROP TABLE parking_tickets;--
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg