Euralarm: safe, secure and resilient Smart Cities Following the earlier webinar last April, Euralarm and IFSEC Global organized a Smart Cities conference in London on Wednesday, 17 June 2015. It focused on digital solutions for keeping citizens safe and secure. City officials and speakers from both the fire and security industries, set out and discussed the key issues on this topic. Smart Cities Around the globe, discussions about a more efficient use of existing public and private assets to create new and more value are trending. A smart city uses digital technologies or information and communication technologies (ICT) to enhance quality and performance of urban services, to reduce costs and resource consumption, and to engage more effectively and actively with its citizens. The Smart City Council defines a smart city as one that has digital technology embedded across all city functions. Safety and Security Industry In the public domain as well as in business- and private domains a large number of security- and safety systems are installed. CCTV-, access control, fire detection, intrusion alarm and evacuation systems are just examples of systems already available. Modern (digital) systems are able to provide valuable information which is of ‘life saving’ importance in case of an incident or worse. On behalf of its members, Euralarm started projects and participates contributing to a European or global approach of ‘Smart Cities’. Together with Euralarm’s PEARS project the Safety and Security Industry is of big value for the Smart City ambition: “Euralarm considers a safe, secure and resilient Smart City as a city that is a planned and functioning city with a minimum disruption from e.q. crime or natural disasters. The city needs to have to capacity to survive, adapt and grow no matter what challenge it is confronted with. The safety and security industry is ready to support Smart Cities initiatives with data provided by protection systems”. Keynote speakers and panel debate Glen Dale, Euralarm’s General Manager opened the conference with a short introduction. Conference moderator Martin Harvey, the chairman of Euralarm’s Services Section, started off by introducing all speakers. The first speaker, Rolf Sigg focused on the Euralarm & Industry perspective. Second speaker Jim Mc Hale, Managing Director and Founder of Memoori Research (www.memoori.com), highlighted big data software in buildings. Neil Orbell, Assistant Commissioner of Fire Safety Regulation and Community Safety of the London Fire Brigade was the third speaker. Nico Tillie of Delft University (NL) shared his experience about the Rotterdam smart city project. Last but not least, Jim Glockling PhD, Technical Director of MiFireE, informed the participants about his Building Information Management concept. Enzo Peduzzi, Euralarm’s new chosen chairman, resumed the conference. Cities never sleep! Around 1 million people around the globe move to a city on a weekly base. Rolf Sigg shared some figures and made clear that in 2020 the majority of people are living on a small percentage of the earth square. As Martin Harvey explained, around 100.000 people are moving into London every year. Of course every individual has his/her own motivation to move to a city. Most people will do so because for economical, study and/or society reasons. It’s hard to believe people will move to a city only because it is smart; there must be something else. Rolf Sigg prepared a survey based on the results of third party consultants on the attractiveness of cities. The results differ when it comes to a top-10 ranking. However, one common interest is clear: in general, people are looking for more quality of life and cities are offering the possibility to belong to a community and a society. Not the technics though ‘social welfare’ is the issue Rolf Sigg started by discussing what a smart city actually should be. A Smart City still is a fuzzy term in peoples thoughts, which implies the use of digital technology to manage all city functions. At this time most Smart Cities initiatives consider a city smart when they use modern, integrated technology services and infrastructure in energy, transport and ICT to respond to social and economic needs of society. A major point to take into consideration is the necessity not to start with technics, but the people living in the city! Communication with stakeholders is of major importance. Focusing on critical infrastructure is the second point to take into consideration. But foremost ‘resilience’ should become the starting point for smart city development. The Internet of Things and Big Data Software Jim McHale researches technologies in buildings. He also focusses on the building’s place in the Smart City. Amongst other topics, safety and security are important elements of smart buildings. By showing a graphical overview of all services that are being offered in buildings, he stated that all these systems produce a lot of data to control and monitor the building’s performance. He gave the example of the video camera, as part of the safety and security system. This is going to be a very important IT center in the internet of things, because it will be able to deliver a lot of intelligent, actionable data on what is happening in the building. Especially in non-domestic buildings, most systems currently only work in their own silo and are very independent. They will start to yield tremendous benefits when these systems are connected to each other outside of their own functional groups. The benefits are not in just creating more data, but in analyzing this additional data. The data from inside the building can now be combined with external data, like the weather, traffic and from social media. To improve the safety and security of a building, this data has to be combined, analyzed, presented and used efficiently and effectively. To cover the topic ‘Smart Cities’ in its full wideness, information for building decision making are of major importance. The number of data that can be tracked form buildings is increasing as Jim Mc Hale showed. From 1,200 Terabytes several years ago to 37,200 Terabytes in 2020. That’s the data acquisition part. On
