Array of Things aims to drive smart city research forward but illustrates the business model challenge

July 10, 2019 | Case Study

While some forward-thinking cities champion "open data" and increasing digitization, most cities are inherently driving blind, with many operational and governance tasks handled manually. Many functions, including transit system operation, urban planning, and citizen engagement, are performed manually. Even datacentric activities like air quality sensing are not done on a large scale, and the data collected is not useful for improving health and quality of life. In order to help acquire and assimilate the data needed to inform these activities, Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) developed the "Array of Things" (AoT) project, which placed a network of more than a hundred multifunctional sensor and compute nodes throughout the city of Chicago and more recently across several other cities.