Situational awareness in Smart Cities – EU Agency for Law Enforcement Training

RSTI participated in the Course on Cyber Security and Cyber Defense held on Nov 2018 at CEPOL (European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Training) headquarters in Budapest, The course was organized in cooperation with the ESDC (European Security and Defence College) and NUPS (Hungarian  National University of Public Service). 

Under the title Challenges of European Cyber Security, the overall aim of the course is to enable participants to recognize the complexity and the threats of the information society we are living in, the basic terms and concepts related to cyber security and cyber defence, and the European institutions and agencies involved and their respective roles.

Prof. Manuel Alvarez-Campana gave a talk on "Situational Awareness on Smart cities". The Smart City paradigm is being increasingly adopted for efficiently managing public services and infrastructures. This model is based on large-scale use of digital technologies and a variety of sensor devices (traffic cameras, validating machines for public transportation cards, environmental sensors, etc.) to monitor and control the state of the city assets. Based on data collected through these devices, along with other digital fingerprints continuously generated by citizens (e.g. the use of their smartphones and Internet, payments with credit cards, …), it is possible to obtain detailed information on the state of the city, even in real time. All this information, properly processed, can be extremely useful for obtaining situational awareness in the event of natural or man-made disasters. 

As a practical case, we will describe the main characteristics of Smart CEI Moncloa platform for Experimentation on Smart Citiy services deployed by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) on the Moncloa Campus. The platform offers an initial set of pilot services, to be extended with additional ones in the future. Currently, there are two sensor networks (approximately 200 sensor units) deployed across the campus providing basic information about people activity and environmental parameters both indoor and outdoor.. For further information on the Smart CEI Moncloa platform see this post, or read our article in the Sensors Magazine.