Port of Hamburg to pave its roads with Cisco things

Cisco's scored a win for its Internet of Everything approach to running cities, with Hamburg Port Authority deciding to try out a “smart road”.

Promising better traffic flow (and the resulting environmental benefits), the “smartROAD” will be built with a variety of environmental partners, and is Cisco's first such win in Europe.

To soothe privacy concerns, the system will blur faces and number plates to anonymise them, and discard them from long-term storage. The focus, Cisco says, is on realtime data and analytics.

Areas of interest include traffic management, where sensors automatically log and report traffic incidents and feed them into a real time traffic management console; as well as structural sensors on infrastructure in the area, including a lifting bridge.

The bridge monitoring will allow technical and maintenance staff to precisely and predictively manage repairs to structures in the area, while minimising disruption to traffic in the surrounding areas.

The project also includes environmental sensors and smart lighting. One of the streets in the area also uses “follow me” lighting to improve the safety and amenity to pedestrians and cyclists using the precinct, while lowering the environmental footprint of the infrastructure.

All the sensors for the smartROAD project are connected using a secure network, in addition to a security framework allowing port management to take security action in real time.

The smartROAD is the result of an agreement signed between the City of Hamburg and Cisco in April 2014. Other partners involved include Philips, for lighting technology, AGT International for analytics and Kiwi, for video analytics and anonymisation,