An Operating System For Cities 216
CProgrammer98 writes "BBC News reports that cities may soon get their own operating system. From the article: 'The Urban OS works just like a PC operating system but keeps buildings, traffic and services running smoothly. The software takes in data from sensors dotted around the city to keep an eye on what is happening. In the event of a fire, the Urban OS might manage traffic lights so fire trucks can reach the blaze swiftly. The sensors monitor everything from large scale events such as traffic flows across the entire city down to more local phenomena such as temperature sensors inside individual rooms. The OS completely bypasses humans to manage communication between sensors and devices such as traffic lights, air conditioning or water pumps that influence the quality of city life."
C2, not OS (Score:5, Informative)
It's not an operating system, it's called command and control. And Katia Moskovitch (who wrote that article) has her head up her ass; several cities are doing this already, exactly as described. Anaheim, for example, has an extremely sophisticated system, especially when it comes to monitoring activity and helping first responders deal with things like car accidents, fires and hazardous material incidents. I've seen it, from the control center, and it frankly blew me away...very cool stuff. The real interesting part isn't about the data from the sensors, however; that's almost useless by itself. The real value comes from fusing that data with information that is kept about the nature of things. For example, when a fire breaks out at X place, there's information on hand about what is normally found there. Let's say it's a warehouse...does that warehouse keep anything particularly dangerous in storage, and if so, what kinds of dangers does it pose? That information is there, and can be relayed to the police and firefighters on scene so that they know what they're dealing with.