Environmental Monitoring Sensor Network for Bhubaneswar Smart City.
Overview
The capital city of Odisha-Bhubaneswar better known as the “City of Temples” is one among the fastest growing commercial and trading hubs of the country. The city emerged top to be developed into a fully smart city under the 1st phase of the Smart Cities Mission launched by the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD).
Problem
The rapid rate of urbanization and increasing vehicular population in the city over the last few years have degraded the quality of environment resulting in poor air quality and rise in noise levels thereby increasing the burden on existing city infrastructure. This has been a matter of grave concern for the city officials and citizens.
The Requirement
With an aspiration to become an environmentally smart and sustainable city, the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC), proposed a pan-city “Smart Solution” project that includes environmental monitoring systems comprising of various sensors and communication technologies for comprehensive monitoring and trending of city environmental parameters.
The project had numerous requirements and challenges as follow:
- Implementation of integrated ambient air and noise pollution monitoring stations comprising of different environmental sensors for monitoring and trending of various ambient air and noise parameters.
- Real-time tracking of air pollution and noise levels within acceptable limits.
- Displaying of parameters to create and raise awareness levels among the citizens and to support ‘open data’ initiatives.
- To establish frameworks for regulating these parameters in terms of any supporting initiatives for maintaining acceptable levels.
- Integration of real-time data for central monitoring at ICOMC, city application, website and digital display screen.
- The entire environmental monitoring system along with the digital display needed to be installed across strategic locations of the city for easy display of environmental parameters to the public.
The Solution
Honeywell India was chosen as the system integrator by the Bhubaneswar Smart City Limited (BSCL) to execute the complete “Smart Solution” project. We, Aurassure Private Ltd. being the collaborative partner of Honeywell India got the opportunity to execute the solution. We together had earlier implemented a similar environmental project for Rajkot Smart City. Hence, we had the experience and expertise to deliver the project effectively and efficiently.
To address the city’s environmental concerns effectively, we conducted a detailed survey of the city and identified the pain points where the sensor stations could be installed along with the display system for public viewing of parameters 24×7.
Our environmental monitoring network system (Aurassure) deployed in the city is composed of a total 10numbers of environment stations monitoring and measuring various parameters such as Carbon Monoxide(CO), Ozone (O3), Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), Sulphur Dioxide (SO2), Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Particulate/SPMProfile (PM10, PM2.5, and TSP), Temperature, Relative Humidity, Wind Speed, Wind Direction, Rainfall, Barometric Pressure, Noise and 2 numbers of Digital Display Systems.
The environmental stations are completely ruggedized for open-air deployments, backed by lithium batteries and 230V AC power supply, with an option of charging through solar panels.
The communication between the sensors and IoT cloud platform for data transmission takes place through the Ethernet and GPRS connection. The data received in the IoT platform is stored and analysed in realtime to make the data meaningful which can be visualized by citizens and administrators through a pollution monitoring dashboard. The dashboards present the data using interactive graphics and statistics for easy interpretation of data.
The dashboard helps visualize AQI data in hourly/monthly basis with an option to define intervals for automatic report generations and to get real-time alerts. The dashboard allows the user to instantly track and visualize the status of any location of the city at his/her own comfort to make informed and wise decisions as per the data available.
Some of the major features of the dashboard include:
- Easy visualization of real-time and historical data in chart and tabular formats.
- Trends of environmental parameters based on user-specific time periods.
- Remote configuration and calibration of sensors.
- Notifications and alerts whenever the environmental parameters breach the safe or normal levels.
The digital display installed were integrated along with the sensors for automatic display of information’s and to publish other informative messages in an attractive manner.
Excepted Benefits
Our smart environmental monitoring platform (Aurassure) will enhance transparency to develop effective solutions to city’s environmental problem through the smart use of technology across the city empowering citizens and decision makers to visualize environmental data in real-time through an open source public portal improving the delivery of public services.
