Thursday, March 27, 2014

Take a Quick Tour of the Smart City Council's Readiness Guide

The Smart Cities Council is an industry coalition that seeks to accelerate the growth of smart cities worldwide. It does this by providing city leaders with access to technology counsel, financial tools, policy frameworks, visibility campaigns, and advocacy. The Council currently includes more than two dozen leading smart city practitioners and an extensive collection of independent advisors. A short video introducing the Smart Cities Council is available here (< 4 min). Invensys joined the Council as an Associate Partner last year, and we recently renewed our partnership, this time as Schneider Electric who acquired Invensys in January 2014.


The first comprehensive, vendor-neutral smart city handbook for city leaders and planners - the Smart Cities Readiness Guide - was developed by the Council. The Guide enables city leaders to assess their current state of technology and its readiness to become a smart city. The 281-page document is available for free download on the Smart City Council's website.

The Council has now released a Readiness Guide "Quick Tour" that highlights in just 13 pages how cities around the world are enhancing operations and improving citizen services with the implementation of smart technologies and how the Readiness Guide helps. The document includes at a high level what a smart city is, the smart city framework, what technology is used and what problems it can solve, the power of smart integration, how smart cities change the game, and how to get started - creating a smart city roadmap. It concludes with answers to a number of frequently asked questions about the Readiness Guide.

To learn more, download the Quick Tour.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Managing Facility Operations for 140 Buildings Across Multiple Campuses at the University of Strasbourg in France

The University of Strasbourg in Strasbourg, France, is among Europe’s foremost research universities and is the second-largest university in France with some 43,000 students. The University’s Energy Department needed to better manage facility operations for 140 buildings on multiple campuses spread across 60 miles of Strasbourg and the surrounding area. No centralized method existed for monitoring and collecting data on assets, HVAC, electricity and other facility processes that would allow staff to review trends and identify better practices for saving time, money and energy.
 
 

"Wonderware System Platform enables the University’s Energy Department to successfully manage operations at our 140 buildings by accurately processing technical data in real-time for assessment. We can now more effectively manage University assets and operations ensuring the comfort of our students, educators, staff and visitors each day."
– Damien Bertrand, Energy Department Manager, University of Strasbourg

 
The search for an open, scalable supervisory control and monitoring system led them to Wonderware® System Platform which provided extensive capabilities and met the University’s need for a solution that collects and manages data from all building systems and assets, and that easily integrated with the University’s existing asset data management program. System Platform efficiently centralizes data gathering and enables extensive data analysis to improve overall asset and energy efficiencies at the University’s distributed campus buildings – everything is built and managed within the same software infrastructure.

Wonderware System Platform also features one of the industry’s most powerful data historian applications, Wonderware Historian, which provides Energy Department staff actionable information with rich data analysis and reporting capabilities. And there is Wonderware InTouch®, an open, extensible supervisory human machine interface (HMI) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) solution that provides user-friendly views of the University’s building control systems to staff and management from any location in real-time.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Wonderware Software Helps AENA Manage Operations at Barcelona El Prat Airport

The gateway to the beautiful city of Barcelona is the El Prat Airport. In a typical year, over 35 million passengers and 96 thousand tons of cargo pass through the airport. AENA is responsible for the operations of the Barcelona El Prat Airport. AENA is one of the world's top airport operators, in terms of the number of passengers handled. More than 200 million travelers pass through AENA's 46 domestic and 15 international airports.

"Our systems allow us to be aware of what is going on in the airport infrastructures, and we manage the airport as an intelligent environment. The 'smart city' concept is very much in vogue nowadays. We can say without any doubt that the Barcelona airport is a smart airport - intelligent, able to manage its infrastructures and always self-aware."
José Luis González, Director de Informática  
 
  
 


AENA's smart airport solution boasts a dynamic, intelligent infrastructure. The control environment for the airport management system handles over 1,000,000 signals. It includes the control of all escalators, elevators and passenger moving walkways; power management; air conditioning; and fire safety systems. It also involves monitoring support for the automated luggage transport system. This fully integrated, multi-hardware solution was made possible with the help of Wonderware.

Wonderware System Platform lets AENA manage a large number of processes in an integrated and simultaneous manner under a single platform. It provides an easy-to-use, flexible and scalable solution that allows AENA to create control templates that can easily be deployed by any of its multiple system integrator contractors.

Today, Wonderware is being used in all 46 airports that AENA manages all over Spain.

For more information, watch the new video, read the success story, or visit our Smart Cities Industry page on software.invensys.com.