Intelligent City

The Intelligent City programme is a Birmingham City wide initiative to be delivered by a partnership between key public and private sector organisations to address key urban issues relating to transport, tourism, security and climate change through the exploitation of information technology. 

The aim of the Intelligent City programme is to establish Birmingham as the UK’s most Intelligent City by 2012 through the exploitation of new technology.  Key objectives in delivering this vision are:

• Develop a technology platform to support new ‘intelligent city’ product/ application development
• Ensure Birmingham is shortlisted for an Intelligent City Award in 2012
• Develop a World Class Intelligent City Demonstrator in Birmingham City Centre
• Develop a programme which will draw in innovative technology companies keen to research, develop and trial new products utilising the Intelligent City Platform.
• Facilitate new innovative Research and Development investment in the Region through the Intelligent City Programme.
• Create new ‘high-value’ jobs in the Region

An overview of the architecture is shown below:

We had data about the road network, the bus routes and schedule as well as access to a service that gave us real time positions of buses on some routes and data of traffic levels.

At the heart of the solution is a service layer that is able to create, store and share routes using that data and services we had available to us. We also built 3 client applications that used this service layer: a website, a mobile application and a mock sat-nav application. As you’d expect, the service layer is WCF, C# and a SQL Server 2008 database.

Some interesting architectural points about the solution are:

• Consistent, connected experience
• Consistent toolset
• Services provide open platform on which new applications can be built
• Services are built on existing services and data which leverages existing investment

The aims of the Proof of Concept (PoC) were to:

• Articulate and demonstrate a slice of the shared Intelligent Cities vision for Birmingham
• Demonstrate an interoperable service layer platform integrated with existing data / services
• Demonstrate compelling user experiences cross-device - manage a journey tracking and hopping across devices and modes of transport
• Demonstrate empowering individuals to make more informed, smarter choices

There are four main components in the Proof of Concept:

• Service Layer
• Web Client
• Mobile Client
• Enhanced Sat Nav

At the core of the service layer, which provides all the common functionality, is the routing algorithm, which has a model we built up of the road and bus network (including the schedule we had) so it could provide multi-modal routes across Birmingham – there is no park and ride scheme as such in Birmingham, so a car route is a car-only route for the purposes of the PoC. The way the model was created means that adding in other forms of transport would be relatively simple, provided you know where the modes of transport intersect (e.g. where a train station or car park is.) Adding in realtime information about journey times would also be simple. 

The website is an ASP.NET App that shows traffic levels in Birmingham along with the realtime bus positions we have layered on Virtual Earth. The mobile application is a Silverlight app that addresses a problem we all face getting around. A mobile application can take advantage of GPS, which is increasingly prevalent in mobile devices. You can log in and retrieve the route you previously saved and the application will guide you along your route – including getting on and off buses.  The mock sat-nav application is a WPF application that is intended to show what a sat-nav could do to take advantage of the service layer. It shows how you could choose to be directed to a public car park near to your destination (you could use the mobile app to get from the car park to your destination.)

Having the service layer made each of these applications quick to develop – and allows the development of other applications. Demonstrating these applications brings that point home and shows how a big difference can be made to our experience of Birmingham in the very near future.