Hull City Council has outlined plans for an integrated smart city platform as part of its effort to harness internet of things (IoT) technology.
It has published a procurement notice indicating that it is looking for a platform to share with partner organisations in a deal that could run for 10 years and be worth around £1 million.
Any services procured will also be made available to other public sector bodies – including local NHS organisations, Humberside Police, Humberside Fire and Rescue, Hull College and Hull University – and Transport for the North.
The council said the key objective is to design, implement and support an integrated platform to bring together a wide range of current and future smart solutions and datasets, coming from a variety of sources.
The platform should make it possible to combine data from sources including sensors, actuators, mobile devices, cameras and third party line of business systems at city level and convert it to actionable intelligence. It should also be able to work with AI systems to handle functions such as adjusting the brightness of street lights and managing traffic controls.
Smart ambitions
This follows previous indications of the council’s ambitions to make the city one of the UK’s leaders in the development of smart places. Earlier this year, Hull’s town clerk Ian Anderson told UKAuthority that it was working on the plan for a cross-city platform with the C4DI digital incubator and it would be used to join up different information systems, such as those for geographic information, street lighting and sensors.
It has also invested in a long range wide area network from local company Connexin to support the application of IoT devices.
Image: Hull City Hall by calflier001, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
