Senseable cities
Posted: May 1st, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Ideas & points of view | No Comments »Developers have created real-time control systems in various engineering applications, dramatically increasing systems’ efficiency by saving energy, regulating the dynamics, and increasing robustness and disturbance tolerance.
But can a city function as a real-time control system? MIT’s WikiCity project aims to find out.
A real-time control system has four key components:
• an entity to be controlled in an uncertain environment,
• sensors that can acquire information about the entity’s state in real time,
• intelligence that can evaluate system performance against desired outcomes, and
• physical actuators that can act on the system to realize the control strategy.
A city could fit the first two definitions. For example, the Real Time Rome project (http://senseable.mit.edu/realtimerome) uses cell phones and GPS devices to collect the movement patterns of people and transportation systems and their
spatial and social use of streets and neighborhoods.
But how could we actuate the city? Although it already contains several classes of actuators, such as traffic lights and
remotely updated street signs, its inhabitants are a much more flexible actuator.
Consequently, we’re creating a platform for storing and exchanging location- and time-sensitive data, making such data accessible to users through mobile devices, Web interfaces, and physical interface objects. This platform
lets people become distributed intelligent actuators, pursuing individual interests in cooperation and competition with others and thus becoming prime actors in improving urban systems’ efficiency.
For more information, contact Francesco
Calabrese at fcalabre@mit.edu or see http://senseable.mit.edu/wikicity.
From Urban Computing and Mobile Devices (IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2007)
