Modelling the city from the kitchen to the national grid: multi-scale Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring

This project aims to monitor people movement at different scales across the city, with a particular focus on transitional spaces, in order to inform operational usage and design/planning of spaces. Transitional spaces and especially people movement within and through them will be used as the lens through which the issues of data discovery, management and governance will be addressed investigating standards, technologies and processes and how these systems can be integrated within modelling systems to improve current understanding. The focus on transitional spaces is because this is where pinch points occur, so making it more efficient can lead to propagated benefits across the city as a whole, including their interdependent infrastructure, as well as making it safer for the people using the spaces.
The research questions proposed by this project are:
* What data and methods of data collection, analysis and visualisation is required to model people movement at different scales within the city?
* What standards of data management, access and privacy are needed when making data useable in a shared and accessible across the city?
* How can multiple IoT systems, particularly those for people monitoring, be made interoperable and subsequently integrated into a seamless system?
* What analytical models are required to enhance understanding of the city, and how can the data needed to parametrise them be collected?
The objectives related to these research questions are:
1) Conduct a comprehensive review of the literature, including the pre-existing technology, analytics and standards
2) Develop and compare different methods of people monitoring, which can be applied to various locations and scalable throughout the city
3) Develop, and design standards to facilitate, a prototype API for data sharing, and subsequently prototype an application to integrate people monitoring systems; this shall also consider data security and privacy
4) Develop prototype analytical tools, an example being to perform predictive modelling using an Agent Based Model which can be parametrised, enhanced and validated using sensor data across domains.
In order to primarily answer these questions and address these objectives, a group of use cases will be worked on. Newcastle, as a city, will be utilised as a vehicle for the project, given its convenient location and pre-existing IoT monitoring infrastructure that the Urban Observatory have established. However, the research will remain transferable to other cities providing sufficient suitable infrastructure exists. The use cases are set to utilise Monument Metro Station and the Urban Sciences Building as testbeds for the research.