IoT / Urban Tech · Case study 08 of 12
Smart Cities
A major metropolitan authority commissioned a city-scale IoT operations platform to unify sensor data from traffic, utilities, public safety, and environmental systems — enabling real-time urban management from a single operations centre.
The challenge
City data existed in 22 separate departmental systems that had never shared data. Traffic management had no visibility into utility maintenance that was causing congestion. Environmental sensors were sampled once daily rather than in real time. Emergency response had no access to live traffic data. Decisions were being made from information that was hours or days old.
The solution
We designed a city operations platform built on a streaming data architecture — ingesting IoT signals from 8,400 sensors in real time. The interface is map-first, with layers that can be combined: overlay traffic flow with utility maintenance schedules and environmental readings simultaneously. Automated processing detects anomalies across sensor networks and surfaces city-wide impact assessments. Departments that had never shared data now see each other's operational state in a shared spatial view.
Our process
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01 Stakeholder Mapping
Engaged 8 city departments. Mapped 60+ distinct data use cases across traffic, utilities, safety, environment, and transit.
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02 Streaming Architecture UX
Designed the interface for real-time data with latency tolerances defined per data type. Traffic: 2s. Environmental: 60s. Utility: 5min.
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03 Map-First Interface Design
Built a multi-layer geospatial interface that lets operators overlay up to 6 data layers simultaneously without visual overload.
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04 Anomaly Surface Design
Designed automated anomaly cards that surface detected cross-domain impacts — e.g. utility outage affecting 3 traffic signals.
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05 Operations Centre Testing
Conducted full scenario testing in a mock operations centre. Ran 12 simulated emergency scenarios with real operators.
Outcomes
- 8,400IoT sensors integrated in real time
- 22→1Departmental systems unified
- Real-timeTraffic & environmental data latency
- 31%Improvement in incident response time