Smart CEI Moncloa Experimentation Platform

Smart CEI Moncloa is an open experimentation platform for Smart City services located in the Madrid Moncloa Campus of International Excellence (CEI Moncloa). It aims to facilitate advanced R&D and training activities done by the University, companies, and public bodies. The platform is part of the project City of the Future of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), aimed to contribute to the development of cities from a multidisciplinary point of view.

Given its exceptional location, integrated within the metropolitan area of Madrid, the Moncloa Campus (shared between two of the largest universities of Spain: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Universidad Complutense de Madrid) has geographic and human characteristics that are sufficiently representative for research and experimentation in Smart City services.

The Campus has around 150 buildings in an area of 5.5 square kilometers, including schools, research centers, and student housing, plus three sport areas and large green spaces. Tens of thousands of cars use the Campus roads every day. The Campus has a good public transport service with two subway lines and thirteen bus lines.

The platform offers an initial set of pilot services, to be extended with additional ones in the future. Currently, there are two sensor networks deployed across the campus providing basic information about people activity and environmental parameters both indoor and outdoor.

Monitoring of people activity is based on the detection of WiFi devices using low cost sensors based on the Raspberry Pi board. These sensor allow the approximate count of people and vehicles in the campus, as well as the analysis of movement patterns, busiest places, times spent in points of interest (e.g. libraries, classrooms), etc.  Environmental monitoring relies on the Arduino-based Smart Citizen Kit (http://smartcitizen.me), which includes sensors for measuring temperature, humidity, light intensity, noise, and air quality.

The platform includes a powerful cloud-based storage and computing infrastructure, providing the adequate resources for collecting and processing the data generated by the sensors.  Access to the processed data, as well as applications based on them (e.g. for consulting environmental data though the campus, real-time occupation of campus libraries, etc.) is provided though the web-based Dashboard (http://ceiboard.dit.upm.es/dashboard). The web server is under continuous development by UPM students and researchers. In addition, a demonstration room with several large screens is available for performing public exhibitions to visitors.

Smart CEI Moncloa provides an ideal framework for performing practical education and research activities in the field of City Sciences. Thus, in the last two years, several students have made use of the platform for their MSc and PhD Thesis, mostly in the field of computer science area. Next academic course, it is expected that the platform will be used in many other areas (urbanism, mobility and transport, energy, etc), both for education and research activities, as well as to develop novelty applications to convert CEI Moncloa into a Smart Campus. For further information, see our paper in Sensors.