PlanIT Valley - the new smart city in Portugal! Date of release : 05/16/2012 Format : News feed 150,000 inhabitants will be able to live in PlanIT Valley. What’s this city’s special feature? Over 100 million sensors will be installed so that the city can “adapt” according to its inhabitants! With almost 50% of the global population living in cities, the development of urban zones represents a genuine economic and ecological issue. The energy challenge is huge, as between 60% and 80% of worldwide energy is consumed by cities.
Tomorrow’s city is being constructed today in PlanIt Valley, thanks to the initiative of Cisco, Microsoft, Philips and many other partners. So, in the morning, when you leave your home to go to work, the temperature will be automatically turned down so as to avoid wasting energy. What is the future for these cities of tomorrow? However, if pushed to its limits, will the smart city genuinely be part of a “win-win” situation for its inhabitants? Science fiction no more: The perfect city is under construction. Formula One car racing is the most viewed sport in the world. On any given race day, half a billion people — one-fourteenth of the globe — are watching it on TV. But it’s what they’re not seeing that wins races today: More than 300 sensors are implanted throughout each vehicle to monitor everything from air displacement to tire temperature to the driver’s heart rate.
These data are continuously transmitted back to a control room, where engineers run millions of calculations in real time and tweak their driver’s strategy accordingly. Through this process, every last ounce of efficiency and performance is wrung out of each car. And so it will be with cities like PlanIT Valley, currently being built from scratch in northern Portugal. “We saw an opportunity … to go create something that was starting with a blank sheet,” said PlanIT Valley creator Steve Lewis, “thinking from a systems-wide process in the same way we would think about computing technologies.” But wait, there’s more! Les villes veulent devenir intelligentes. Ville intelligente : vers un «système d’exploitation» basé sur des capteurs urbains.