Page:Catalyzing the Internet of Things and Smart Cities ： Global City Teams Challenge.pdf/3

 to coalesce around shared challenges (e.g., air pollution, traffic management, emergency response) to create teams called “Action Clusters.” Each Action Cluster creates a project plan with a timeline to demonstrate their accomplishments in a tangible manner. Because each action cluster includes multiple members, it is likely that the outcome of the solution will be replicable to other cities. In the case that a team has only one municipal partner, the team is encouraged to establish additional partnerships with other cities by demonstrating measurable and quantifiable benefits of the solution. It is also important to note that replicability and interoperability should be based on collaboration that is global rather than just regional.



Figure 2: GCTC Approach

Cities have two strong reasons for participating in GCTC. For the cities that have already gone through successful deployments, it is an opportunity to promote their solutions and be the origin of replication for other cities that are facing similar challenges. For the cities that are just starting to consider the deployment of smart city solutions, it is an opportunity to learn from other cities’ projects and to showcase their own city as a ready partner to organizations with replicable smart city technologies.

For corporations, GCTC is an opportunity to identify new business partners, demonstrate their proven solutions, and enlarge their market.

Academic institutions participate in order to find opportunities for joint R&D with cities/communities and partners that will enable the joint development and deployment of new technologies. The process also allows researchers to identify key common characteristics and components among different applications and implementations, which will help the market to find convergence on best practices and eventually lead to broadly adopted standards.

B. GCTC 2015

The first round of GCTC culminated on June 1, 2015, after a nine-month-long process of team building, incubation, solution development, and deployment. More than 60 teams, composed of over 200 organizations and three dozen cities/communities around the world, gathered at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., to present and demonstrate the impact of their smart city solutions. Many high-profile visitors and speakers, including King WillemAlexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx, came to celebrate and encourage the teams’ accomplishments. The event was attended by over 1300 people and was covered by many media outlets.

C. GCTC 2016-2017

Based on the success of GCTC 2015, the next round was launched in November 2015. This new GCTC round is composed of two phases. The first phase will continue until June 2016, with the focus on building the teams and defining the project goals, timelines, and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of the quantifiable impacts to residents and citizens. Participants will demonstrate and pilot the solutions and will build partnerships with as many cities as possible. The second phase will focus on deploying the solutions, achieving the goals (based on the KPIs devised during Phase 1), and measuring the impacts. Phase 2 will culminate in June 2017.

GCTC 2016-2017 carries over the key elements of GCTC 2015, and adds two more ambitious goals, encouraging the teams to:


 * deploy the shared and replicable solutions in multiple cities, potentially on multiple continents and


 * provide tangible measurements of the improvements made by the solutions, such as reduction of average commute time, reduction of air pollution, reduction of water loss.

One of the missing links in accelerating the deployment of IoT/CPS and smart city solutions is the lack of a “connectivity fabric”--a commonly shared IoT/CPS network infrastructure among cities and communities. As of today, there is no easy mechanism for an IoT solution to be deployed and become operational in a plug-and-play manner. For example, a simple flood-level sensor deployed in one city may not share the same backbone infrastructure required to exchange data with sensors in other cities. The current landscape of IoT and smart city is similar to that of the communications infrastructure of preInternet days.

It is essential that a communications fabric infrastructure be developed that can enable IoT devices and smart city solutions to identify and communicate in a plug-and-play manner, to create synergy between sectors, to reduce overhead, and to catalyze the mass adoption of affordable solutions by the residents in cities and communities. The IoT/Smart City fabric would enable sharing and replication of the solutions beyond the city limit, just as the Internet broke the physical-distance barrier for communications and commerce. Combined with multi-stakeholder collaboration programs such as GCTC, the IoT/Smart City fabric—built to be open and neutral--could allow many cities and communities, large and small, to enjoy