Stardome’s solution for smart cities

The notion of smart city, is not a narrowly defined concept, but a reference paradigm for the design and management of spaces, resources, relationships and flows in the urban fabric, starting with the integration of data and processes in a common ecosystem. Underlying this paradigm, then, is the concept of digital twin, that is, the possibility of making, from sufficiently timely and up-to-date data sources, a digital copy of a real object, capable of exactly replicating its behaviors or simulating new ones.

Thus, for example, a map of a neighborhood that signals all traffic lights and reports their status (green/yellow/red) in real time can be useful both for tracking traffic developments and for simulating the impact of any change in on-time or transition times and for remotely piloting the switching on of traffic lights according to traffic. Similarly, connected and certified electricity meters can provide a real-time assessment of the consumption of different utilities with a level of accuracy and timeliness that would otherwise be impossible, helping to distribute energy more efficiently and avoid service disruptions. In addition, the data collected can be used to assess several key characteristics of urban consumption and help manage operational flows. Connected and certified street lighting can also be used in an evolved way, either by modulating lighting emissions according to environmental conditions to reduce waste, or by adapting it to traffic and schedules; also, embedded in an expert system for traffic management/monitoring, it allows the evaluation of the impact of lighting on safety and traffic and guides the design of corrective or supplementary interventions.

More broadly, the ability to connect and certify various devices present in a point-like manner in the urban fabric (e.g., meters, charging stations, remote sensing stations, cameras, etc.) enables both more accurate measurement of equipment, improved maintenance and timely resolution of emergencies, and enables smart city processes, which are essentially based on the ability to produce data in constant, interconnected and verified streams. An important advantage of this approach is its scalability: once an initial set of data and processes and a measurement and analysis system have been defined around a specific urban system (e.g., traffic, mobility, logistics, environmental monitoring, energy management, etc.), others can be connected to it with relative ease but with a significant multiplier of capabilities and functionality.

Indeed, the smart city is a system of systems, whose capabilities grow in geometric progression: having source certification solutions dispersed throughout the territory is the enabling condition, from which a large energy manager can present itself as a partner of choice for the implementation of the infrastructure.

Smart city configuration

In a smart city scenario, the Stardome system is implemented at the data source using SGE modules, MCU-based PCBs with low power consumption and small size, suitable for integration into

• production, monitoring and data collection facilities (energy, waste treatment, etc.. )
• vehicles and optical surveillance devices, access devices (traffic monitoring, access management to public places, incident and emergency management)
• private and public communication systems (digital networks, data centers, connection hubs and gateways, private facilities for public use)
• personal, wearable and/or mobile devices (access and authentication devices)

Each SGE module is to be regarded as the user’s or facility’s own registration device, capable of affixing a digital signature to data using a security certificate whose assignment to the SGE module itself is verifiable on DLT. SGE devices are, in fact, equipped with unique digital identities registered on DLT and defined according to the implementation agreements, and they also identify on them the user or facility connected to the SGE module. The list of digital identities of SGE modules, users and facilities is used by Stardome servers to create the corresponding digital certificates and register them on the DLT.

In general, the Stardome system uses the SGE hardware modules to record events and data exhibited by the connected device.