[ui!] was invited to work with Council to identify and scope a smart cities technologies pilot project within the smart city strategic direction of the Authority. The aims of the trial were to:

□ Create a ‘living lab’ for Council’s smart city vision and journey;
□ Provide a testbed for third party innovation, partnering and sharing;
□ Inform discussions around operational effectiveness, asset management and business processes;
□ Be a case study in Council’s evolution towards agile, fail-fast development and innovation; and
□ Allow Council to continue to experiment with data models including open data and 3rd party data sharing.

The preferred location for the trial was chosen because:

□ It has several important variables:

o Short and long term vehicle parking;
o Ferry terminal;
o Bus interchange;
o Pedestrian and cycling infrastructure for access to and from the ferry terminal; and
o A varying patronage throughout the day, including commuters, visitors, retirees, etc.

□ The parking area can be used to experiment with the parking sensor technology, and parking in both the short and long term lots will turn over frequently enough to produce interesting data.


□ Sensors (including parking sensors, IR cameras for people and/or traffic counting, CCTV cameras for security/people counting/traffic counting) environmental sensors, WiFi base stations) can be mounted on existing infrastructure, on new infrastructure (deploy smart poles with integrated technology), or on a mixture of the two. Which gives Council the opportunity to learn about the benefits/difficulties associated with each approach.


□ Smart poles were chosen as they can also be used for an Electric Vehicle charging trial.


□ There is significant interest in people-counting in the project area, in part to understand how people transition between the various transport modalities outlined above, and in part to gather insights that will shape the future commercial development of the ferry terminal.


□ The location affords interesting opportunities to integrate across, and apply analytics to, the diversity of data sources implied above (parking data, people- counting/tracking data from cameras and or WiFi-based counting , bus passenger data through Council’s transport cards, ferry passenger data through Council’s transport cards and environmental sensors).

GoogleEarth screenshot of the trial location


The various sensors and public transport data have been connected to [ui!]’s UrbanPulse open data platform, which can be used for data integration, analytics and visualisation, as well as feeding data to existing Council projects. The existing free WiFi network in the city, which supports tracking, will also be integrated.

[ui!] delivered its UrbanPulse open data platform to meet Council’s business requirements. [ui!] sourced and managed the installation of multi-functional smart poles (including electric vehicle charging facilities), WiFi, environmental sensors, emergency calling, smart parking technologies (both above and in- ground solutions). The [ui!] UrbanPulse platform ingests data for these sensors and devices along with data from Council’s transport cards and transport information systems to provide Council with an integrated real- time view of:

□ People movement in the area (especially through the terminal building);
□ WiFi use;
□ Pollution levels;
□ Noise levels;
□ Public transport timetables;
□ Short and long term parking bay usage;
□ Commuter numbers (bus and ferry); and
□ Electric vehicle charger usage.

In conjunction with Council, [ui!] also developed a support process and a system for any customer queries associated with the Electric Vehicle charging facilities.

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