A study, committed by the dep. Of Economic Affairs, has been done by Mrs. Karma Sierts, Publicase, in order to make a long list of interesting Wireless applications, to be used by the Groningen Municipality. Suggestions have been made to reduce this long list to a short list.

The underlying questions were:

-         what applications of a wireless network would be useable for the municipality?

-         What boundary conditions would there be for these applications?

The research was done by a series of brainstorm-sessions within each of the 8 divisions of the municipality. The results of these sessions have been consolidated with criteria for usability, possibility and feasibility, and described in terms of functionality needed by a network.

A similar study has been done with the Groningen University, the Hanze University, the Noorderpoort Vocational College and the regional Policeforce.

About Groningen municipality

The Groningen Municipality (83km2, 183.000 inhabitants) has 3000 employees, of whom 10% (estimation) are mobile workers within the city-borders. The Municipality manages 2000 objects (buildings, traffic lights, sewage-pumps, energymeters, parkingmeters etc.), not counting a 30.000 lampposts!

Together with the Groningen University and the Hanze University the municipality is undertaking a European tender for a WIFI-network, covering the entire 83km2 of the city. The budget for this tender is €3 million.

The municipality is organised in 8 semi-independent departments, lead by a board of the mayor and 6 eldermen, and controlled by an elected council. It has strong relations to the Regional Policeforce, and is leading partner in the province of Groningen for Firebrigades and emergency Healthservices.

The longlist

The following functional clusters in applications have been made:

1. management of objects
2. camera observation
3. mobile enforcement
4. mobile workforce
5. applications in cooperation with other organisations

1: management of objects:

a.       monitoring and switching of traffic lights (40 installations)

a European tender will be issued in 2008. Now a LF-signal over powerlines is used. Budget available: € 0,5M

b.      reading out energymeters (800 meters)

Dutch law makes it obligatory in 2011 to have meters that can be read on-line, with a minimum frequency of once every 15 minutes. Many installations are not within reach of a internet-connection. Budget available: € 0,5M

c.       switching and dimming of public lighting (700 clusters).

Accounts for 1/3 of the energy-use of the municipality! Possible savings of 30% (€ 0,2M per year)

d.      mobile installations for roadtraffic-counts (60 installations)

Now using GSM-technology, more functionality needed (cams, speed, direction).

e.       Vehicle Information Systems: onboard systems for information to the vehicle and driver, and from vehicle and driver (100 vehicles?)

Used by firebrigade (buildingplans, info on hazardous materials etc.) Also usable for effective routing)

f.        telemonitoring subterranean garbagecontainers (700 containers)

The subterranean garbagecontainers signal by sms when emptying is needed. This costs €120.000 per year for sms-traffic alone!

g.       internetconnection to buildings that are not connected to the municipal network (# unknown)

h.       Dynamic traffic management

A system for intelligently switching all traffic installations in Groningen, based on telemetry of actual traffic situation, and request from blue-light forces, with onboard feedback to users of navigations systems like TomTom

2: camera observation

Several of the departments have expressed the wish to employ flexible camerasystems, mostly to act against theft and vandalism. The Social services (responsible for policing Social security fraud) has expressed the wish to employ cams for covered surveillance. Totally about 25 cams.

3: mobile enforcing

a.       Dep. Of city planning: enabling mobile enforcement for building inspectors, horeca-inspectors and prostitution-officers. 25 officers would be enabled to work with mobile devices (tabletpc’s) with buildingplans, permission details, historic correspondence and incident-registration

b.      Fireprevention squad: 15 officers with laptops/tablets with buildingplans, regulations, permission details, historic correspondence and incident-registration, could advice their clients.

c.       Environmental services: enabling 10 officers with laptops with permission details, historic correspondence and incident-registration

d.      Social Services: giving mobile teams (visiting clients at their homes) would like on-line access to their client-info system.

e.       Dep. of Information and Registration: Mobile access for tax-inspectors (15-30 persons

4: Mobile workforce.

About 400 city employees are highly mobile within the city. They need access to office- and back-office systems.

Subdivisions: Building crews (working from offie-caravans and – containers, 40 crews), maintainance of parkingmeters, exterior objects, parks, schools etc (need info on the objects, access to incident-reporting, and work-orders), Health dept (needs online access to handbooks and protocols), sales personnel (sales of garbage services),

Festivals and manifestations in the public space (info, internet access and financial transactions

And in general normal employes who happen to be mobile and need access to their working place.

5: partnered solutions:

a.       Touristic services (with city marketing and SME’s)

b.      Health care services (with home-nurses, doctors, pharmacies and hospitals)

c.       Education: access to blackboard etc, serious gaming, camera surveillance, mobile workers, classes-at-a-distance

6: Policeforce

a.       Mobile access for policepatrols

b.      Attentionservice: alerting cops in special cases

c.       Mobile videoteams in high risk situations, with a team advising from the policestation

d.      Camsurveillance (with aggression detection)

e.       Traffic guidance with urgent calls (stetting of trafficlights, anti collision detection etc.)

f.        Computer aided dispatch: the responders get info and situational awareness while driving to the accident/incident

Technical conditions and userprofiling

Many conditions have to be met, but vary from application to application. The full spectrum:

* city wide network
* encryption/secure
* guaranteed data-transfer
* high-latency (1/time needed to send a datapackage from A to B)
* high availability, high SLA’s standards
* high bandwidth
* mobility (need to be on the move while receiving or sending data)
* in vehicle use (connectivity @ 70 km/h)
* connectivity inside buildings needed
* fallback needed (when connection fails, connection to another network is possible)
* location-services needed (GPS or other)
* high peak usage (discrepancy between average usage and peak usage is high)
* coverage outside city is wanted

From the longlist of applications and the list of conditions, 5 userprofiles have been deducted:

1. Objects: need guaranteed datatransfer, high availability, encryption, low bandwidth, about 2000 municipal objects
2. Cameras: need guaranteed datatransfer, high availability, encryption, high bandwidth, high latency, 40-90 objects (municipal, police and educational sector)
3. Professional user: citywide coverage, high availability, encryption, high bandwidth, connectivity inside buildings, and in case of VOIP (internet telephony) high latency, 500-900 users (municipal and educational)
4. Professional user Plus: see above, plus location services and in vehicle use, 25 users (police)
5. Consumer: Citywide, encryption, high bandwidth, connectivity inside wanted, lower availability, risk of peak-use.

The user profiles have been used for the specs of the tender for the network.

The shortlist

From the longlist a shortlist has been deduced. Applications have been selected for their impact, the ease of implementation and their financial feasibility.

1. Smart energymeters, and smart public lighting (1b and 1c): these applications will lead to substantial savings on energycosts, and a positive effect on the longterm sustainability goals of Groningen. High impact, financial very sound, but especially 1b will not be trivial to implement!
2. Mobile enforcement (section 3): has a positive impact on delivering governmental services, financial sound, not very hard to implement: most (fixed) applications cn easily be used
3. Mobile Workforce (section 4): also with positive impact, financial not very exciting, and by use of the existing teleworking-infrastructure easy to implement
4. Dynamic trafficmanagement (1h): This is a somewhat longterm goal, but with very high impact on economy and sustainability. Use of a wireless network is financial attractive, since Groningen does not have a traffic sensor network in place. Impelmentation is difficult, though