CIOInsider India Magazine
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Anil Agrawal
CEO
LEDs are now the standard replacement for legacy lighting in most cities around the world. At the same time, smart controls are becoming more main-stream and are increasingly installed alongside LED deployments. The next frontier for smart street lighting networks involves rapidly increasing deployments of controls technology and a transition to being utilized as a broader platform for Smart City innovations. Although such advancements in India are gaining pace, we still need key enablers to support these efforts. Headquartered in Billerica, MA with an Indian office in Ahmedabad, CIMCON Lighting is the world’s leading provider of software powered lighting controllers and Internet of Things (IoT) enabled Smart City lighting management solutions. With installations in over 100 cities in 20+ countries, the company helps cities run smarter while reducing energy and maintenance costs. One of CIMCON’s revolutionary new solutions is the NearSky platform. This solution is the first of its kind to transform a city's existing streetlight infrastructure into a robust Internet of Outdoor Things to help the city or utility monitor, meter, manage and monetize the streetlight and other assets affixed to or located near the streetlight pole. The result is increased operational efficiency, reduced energy costs, greater environmental sustainability, improved public safety and resident quality of life.
Smart and connected street lights utilizing CIMCON’s NearSky 360 sensor hub and cloud-based NearSky Vue information hub is the ideal gateway and software suite for migrating to a smart, digital city. CIMCON’s NearSky platform connects people with data. Using the data available through CIMCON’s NearSky platform, cities and utilities are better able to monitor, manage and monetize the streetlight and other city assets affixed to or near the streetlight pole”, explains Anil Agrawal, CEO, CIMCON Lighting. CIMCON’s NearSky 360 sensor hub provides a sturdy, scalable landing
platform for data from sensors, controls and devices on or near the streetlight pole. At the same time, CIMCON’s Near Sky Vue information hub enables a city to easily collect, aggregate, and visualize data from a wide range of instrumented assets in one location. This enables the flexibility and strategic vision essential to harness the power that smart technologies provide, thereby ensuring a seamless urban experience.
The NearSky platform has been designed specifically to support integration with multiple central management systems
Better operational visibility and asset management are critical first steps in building a Smart City. CIMCON’s intelligent, wireless controls provide the ideal 'on-ramp' for connecting a city’s streetlights with other assets and making them 'smart'. Designed for LED, Solar and HID based lamps, CIMCON uses the latest RF-Wireless technology to connect its 7-pin ANSI compliant controllers to a robust web-based Central Management System (CMS) via a wireless gateway, allowing cities to quickly and easily manage all street and roadway lighting assets via one easy to use platform.
Effective and timely crisis response is critical for the successful management of any city. With exponential growth in generated data, cities must leverage predictive analytics to make informed decisions around areas such as traffic, weather, emergency response, and other civil activities. CIMCON’s NearSky Vue combines analysis of IoT data through machine learning, application of rules engines, and internet scale notification services to predict, detect, and alert events just-in-time, ahead of time and more importantly, in real-time.
The NearSky platform leverages edge computing to minimize the dependence on communication links, to reduce cloud infrastructure communication and processing costs, and to increase system resiliency, thus enabling autonomous operation at the pole. In addition, the NearSky platform has been designed specifically to support integration with multiple central management systems, leveraging industry standard methods (e.g. RESTful web services, MQTT) to ensure scalable data integrity and availability. The end-to-end two-way supervision on communication links, local
configuration storage, edge processing, predictive analytics, content syndication, role and attribute based access control, and disaster recovery functions thereby provide a robust enterprise class NearSky Smart City infrastructure.
CIMCON will continue to innovate the NearSky platform, resulting in lowering the bar of entry for Smart City application providers to bring new solutions to market that will enable cities to create currently unthought of revenue streams, justify business development efforts, measure the impact of rejuvenation programs, track the environmental health of neighborhoods, and attract new residents and businesses. CIMCON’s NearSky platform will continue to dramatically reduce the time from new solution ideation to deployment and minimize the risk to the city in rolling out new services and applications. Given the company’s history, thought leadership, and innovation, the country can expect CIMCON Lighting to continue to pave the way for Smart Cities by driving down cost and risk, while increasing the speed and agility with which city staff can respond to events and maximize new opportunities.
Key benefits to a city for implementing the NearSky platform include:
•Public Safety&Quality of Life
• Improved safety through improved lighting and alerts
• Flood monitoring and notification
• Noise level monitoring of construction zones and night-life districts
• Fence Line monitoring of industrial and construction zones
• Measure environmental impact of idling cars in traffic
• Improved Situational Awareness using sensor fusion techniques
• Operational Efficiencies
• Improved asset management and reduced maintenance costs
• Ability to implement Electric Metering of LED lighting and attached
sensors
• Reduced energy costs through flexible dimming schedules of LED lighting
• Waste bin management and efficient collection routes
• Improved parking space occupancy detection and free space notifications
• Economic Development, Innovation, & New Revenue
• Street usage estimation (pedestrian, bicycle, and car counting)
• Syndication of aggregated sensor information to interested stakeholders
including startups, universities, and open data portals Ability to generate revenue from EV Chargers and Electronic Advertising.
