A robust IoT ecosystems can be used by cities to help facilities waste management to the benefit of its citizens.
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The scenario is becoming all too familiar. Developers considering investing in a municipality or county find their project plans must be put on hold because inefficient waste management infrastructure and aging sewer lines cannot handle any additional load and a moratorium on new development is issued. As one developer stated, “Without adequate waste management capacity, we can’t build.” For a city, potential economic growth and job creation is delayed or even stymied as projects move elsewhere.
Cities occupy only 2% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface, but consume more than 75% of the natural resources, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. With the rapid pace of urbanization, waste management is becoming a bigger issue each day.
However, like a number of other industries, waste management solutions are being enhanced and made more efficient, thanks to the ubiquitous sensors, low-power connectivity and cloud-based analytics that are the fundamental underpinnings of the internet of things. Smart solid waste management is a central focus of many smart cities projects. From smart trash bins providing real-time information on garbage content levels to cloud-based scheduling and route optimization for garbage trucks, IoT technology has an important role to play in improving solid waste management practices and procedures to better serve citizens.
But the problem with many of today’s smart solid waste management technologies is that these applications exist in silos. Even if fully automated, they often do not work efficiently together. Collection vehicles may have GPS sensors for fleet tracking, but pickup routes are often statically assigned and do not react dynamically to changes in bin content levels. Bins may have radio-frequency identification tags for identification, but these tags are not tied to sensors that can report the real-time bin content levels. A “smart” city will not be truly smart until its applications can work efficiently together.
Even within a smart city silo such as waste management, it is crucial for applications to work together. When several waste management applications are designed and built with the ability to communicate, share data and work together to optimize outcomes, the entire waste management process can be far more efficient.
Consider the following scenario employing field sensor data collection, real-time alerts and dashboards:
A city deploys a fleet of collection vehicles with GPS-based tracking. The city also deploys smart trash bins with RFID tags and IoT sensors that measure fill levels. At the start of the work day, bins are efficiently assigned to trucks – those that pick up trash and those that pick up recyclables – based on truck capacity, bin fill level and total route distance (including distance from depot). Routes are optimized to reduce the number of truck rolls, fuel consumption and total worker hours. Upon pickup, collectors automatically scan the RFID tags on the bins and the time-stamped data is captured and uploaded to the cloud. Route locations are actively monitored and can be altered, depending on shifting capacities. For instance, a customer might use an app to request and early pickup (when the bin is not full) to ensure that there is enough capacity for a party that evening. Geo-fence alerts can report when trucks deviate from prescribed routes. Skipped bins are easily identified along with which trucks were assigned to the route and which route was actually taken. Finally, the system learns the behavior of residents in the community, making predictions on when demand will peak and recommending the scheduling of the trucks and the mobile workforce to ensure that demand will be met.
But the optimization does not have to end there. Data from the route scheduling application can be used to predict how much of each type of waste will be delivered to the processing plants. In anticipation of the waste itself – food, paper, plastic, metal, hazardous/non-hazardous – that will be segregated and processed, resources at the transfer stations, incineration and landfill selection can optimized, ensuring the lowest cost for processing that waste. Finally, more accurate projections can enable the monetization of both the waste and data being collected. Dynamic market-based pricing incentives can flow through to residents.
Compostable and biodegradable waste can be used to in agriculture and in biogas reactors to create energy. Various types of recyclables (glass, paper, plastic) each have market value and that value improves with more efficient segregation at the point of collection. Waste collection pricing incentives can be based on the market value of the recyclables processed, providing additional motivation for residents to efficiently segregate their waste. Data on waste collection patterns can be shared with government agencies that will use it to inform planning decisions.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. In a world where, increasingly, data is the currency that is most highly valued, opportunities for leveraging waste management data to simultaneously improve environments, enhance businesses and stimulate economies abound.
However, existing IoT application development platforms are not designed with the creation and monetization of application ecosystems in mind. The good news is that IoT application developers are now able to take advantage of IoT service creation and enrichment platforms, a suite of complementary cloud-based IoT services that can be used with existing IoT platforms (such as Amazon Web Services IoT and Azure IoT) to rapidly create, interwork and monetize an entire ecosystem of smart solid waste management IoT applications.
An IoT SCEP must provide these crucial capabilities to empower the creation of rich IoT ecosystems:
• Visual service design – lets application providers rapidly modify the workflow of their services, without programming effort.
• Visual application service exposure – allows the services of an application to be easily exposed, discovered and consumed by other applications.
• API monetization – allows application providers to assign a commercial value to the services they expose and to share that value with partners.
• Data commercialization – allow valuable data to flow easily to partners and customers who are willing to pay for that value.
• Visual analytics design – allows data to be visualized and insight to emerge from the data collected without programming effort.
Whether developing a smart solid waste management, smart health care, smart manufacturing or any other IoT solution, these building blocks of an IoT SCEP provide the critical missing elements needed for creating dynamic IoT application ecosystems – where applications work together to improve business efficiency, expose valuable insight and monetize data collected.
Smart solid waste management provides a compelling example of how many formerly siloed applications (such as work force management, smart bins management, smart vehicle routing and tracking and smart waste processing) all can work together to streamline efficiency and improve lives within a smart city. Interconnected applications, shared data and distributed cloud-based intelligence are key components for making smart solid waste management (and truly smart cities) a reality.
Photo copyright: kadmy / 123RF Stock Photo
