How Martel’s Orchestra Cities supports Switzerland’s largest community
Orchestra Cities (OC), an open source platform developed by Martel enabling digitally empowered and sustainable smart cities, has been implemented in one of the largest communities in Switzerland, through a fruitful collaboration with the Elektrizitätswerke des Kantons Zürich (EKZ), the energy provider in the Canton of Zurich.
EKZ caters to about a million people and it needs reliable data to provide quality services. It uses sensor data and data from open sources shared by its different municipalities so that the municipalities can support traffic management, waste management and environmental monitoring with different services and load levels.
Orchestra Cities, Martel’s smart cities open source platform, designed for digitally empowered and sustainable smart communities, allows EKZ to tailor the support for multiple use cases with adjustable information sharing, leveraging the platform’s multi-tenancy and cloud-native, elastic architecture. OC creates a space where different municipalities can come together and share the fractions of their data and services they find convenient. These external data sources can be used and integrated with sensor data to provide insightful combinations to city stakeholders. Orchestra Cities scalable back-end reliably delivers real-time data streams to both Web dashboards and end-user mobile applications.
“At Martel, we believe that any city should be able to access smart services. By allowing cities to easily collect, process and share data, analytics insights and services, Orchestra Cities provides the foundation for a citizen-centric IoT-based platform able to help reduce their costs and drive their digital transformation”
said Giovanni Rimassa, Chief Innovation Officer at Martel.
Orchestra Cities differs from other platforms by taking the approach that the most efficient and effective way to deliver on the goals of openness, sustainability, and social impact is to support multiple cities in a single platform. This approach brings several advantages in terms of costs, scalability and modularity, and it is an important trait of the partnership with EKZ. As a trusted energy provider, EKZ can act as a system integrator and solution provider for individual Swiss municipalities as well as whole clusters of them, a positioning that fits the Swiss market well and can bring IoT and Smart City benefits to a much wider and diverse population than only urban residents of a few major cities.
The picture below shows the EKZ-OC dashboard where we can see data from multiple features like air quality index, traffic noise level, available charging stations for Electric vehicles, and so on.
Smart cities and Artificial Intelligence
The partnership between EKZ and Martel continues to progress, building on the current work and achievements of the past years. An important direction of work for the Orchestra Cities product concerns the usage of Artificial Intelligence techniques to analyse, predict and explain time-series trends in various urban data streams (air quality, traffic, distribution of parking occupancy, etc.) to allow ultimately digitally empowered and sustainable smart communities.
Orchestra Cities in a nutshell
Orchestra Cities (OC) is a commercial smart cities platform offering from Martel Innovate, for digitally empowered and sustainable smart communities. As an IoT smart city platform, OC enables cities to develop and share smart city services, data and metrics. It is open source and uses open APIs and open data models. OC is a data and IoT-driven solution designed as a citizen-centric platform, prioritizing the needs of city inhabitants such as security, mobility, health and efficiency as well as understanding the needs of public officers and business operators.
