CityWatch: exploiting sensor data to manage cities better

ABSTRACT Persistent urbanisation of our planet places a continuous strain on cities’ resources and the quality of service delivery. While increasing city infrastructure might help alleviate this problem, the scale and complexity of future cities mean that this approach is unsustainable. Cities, however, are becoming increasingly instrumented with a myriad of sensors, both fixed and mobile. While a number of systems aim to exploit such sensors to gather information and to provide a real‐time view of the city, existing approaches are application‐specific, hindering their scalability and reuse. Using the city of Dublin (Ireland) as a testbed, this paper describes our iterative consultation process with city stakeholders to design CityWatch, an urban‐scale data sensing and dissemination framework. In particular, it presents the resulting design of two prototype applications, the requirements on the overall framework, an initial implementation, and discusses the early results of ongoing trials. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.