Atos platform helps cities deliver smart services

  • July 21, 2021
  • Steve Rogerson

French IT consulting company Atos has created a platform that aims to make smart cities a reality by helping governments deliver smart integrated services to citizens, visitors and economic partners.

At its annual Atos Technology Days event this month, it presented the Urban Data Platform, which lets a city benefit from the combination of all data generated by a wide ecosystem of smart city services, applications and intelligent devices. It manages and publishes data across the city’s operational areas, providing a single secure access point and monitoring dashboards for all data-driven services.

The platform is underpinned by the design principles of a digital hub, also announced at the event. It is based on open-source technologies and provides security and data privacy rules on data capture, storage and access. It can act as the backbone of a data-driven city and the enabler of a robust data economy.

For cities and local authorities, the urgent need to meet key sustainability goals and deliver smart services demands unified thinking and integrated delivery. Where most cities start with a vertical approach, focusing on a single topic such as street lighting, Atos focuses on the horizontal layer to increase the benefits of combining data from many different sources.

For example, it can capture data on current traffic situations, parking availability and alternative transport options and present them in a single accessible view so citizens can make better-informed choices to adapt their travel plans in real time. This collaborative approach can reduce traffic flow, facilitate parking and improve overall air quality.

It can help a city support local energy transition by creating more awareness and support citizens to extend privately-owned photovoltaic systems. This includes the deployment of solar panels on rooftops of public buildings. By distributing the surplus energy to the citizens who participate, interest to invest in private photovoltaic systems will increase.

The platform can be used for other use cases such as care services or security and public safety.

It integrates various IoT functionalities to ingest, analyse and present a collection of data. Based on hybrid cloud containerisation, the platform is scalable and stores historical data and indicators that are correlated using AI. It also embeds edge server technology to reduce latency, secure privacy and improve delivery of services. And it can integrate existing systems and supports the monitoring of embedded systems.

In addition, it adheres to globally defined open standards by OASC and is based on open-source technologies powered by Fiware. OASC is an international smart city network creating and shaping a global smart city data and services market. Fiware is a curated framework of open-source platform components.

Finally, the platform will be enriched with the firm’s computer vision platform for AI video and image analytics.

“A smart city is a data-driven city,” said Luiz Domingos, chief technology officer at Atos “As cities need to create an ecosystem of partners to create services and use data, Atos Urban Data Platform is the centrepiece of a platform-of-platforms approach, agglomerating data from disparate smart city services platforms, and enables effective public data management for safety, mobility or utilities. The success of data-driven cities depends on the confidence they can place in the reliability of the information provided. What is important is the accuracy, availability, confidentiality and accessibility of data.”

Atos is already supporting several cities and communities such as Eindhoven in the Netherlands where the group is using big data for real-time incident response management to address anomalies such as a group of people running or sound of aggression to ensure public safety in Stratumseind street.

Atos has 105,000 employees and annual revenue of over €11bn. The group provides tailored end-to-end technology for all industries in 71 countries.