Research centre a ‘smart’ move in development of cities

The Cities Research Centre (SCRC) at King Mongkut Institute Ladkrabang (KMITL) is the country’s first research unit for the development of cities that will utilise information technologies (IT) to improve people’s quality of life. 
“The smart-city concept has provided answers to problems including traffic congestion, pollution, energy over-consumption, waste management, social issues, including overcrowding. These are common in fast-growing cities,” SCRC director Agachai Sumalee said. 
He said several big companies and leading academic institutions had advocated the concept as it could help alleviate many problems. He added that that the initiative could boost peoples’ quality of life as companies were competing with each other to create innovations and services for consumers as well as developing infrastructure in tandem with the government sector.
Agachai said that IT solutions could be implemented to control transportation, energy, water and other services as well as providing information to the public. 
“Monitoring systems could be developed for specific purposes such as a smart metering, collecting electricity consumption data of each household, and traffic conditions via CCTV or radar,” he said.
He said that another approach to collect data was crowd sourcing where data would be collected from residents.
“Information could also be obtained from social networks. Even the routes residents use when they go out could be collected by signals sent from their smartphones” he added. “The concept could also help in urban management and infrastructure policymaking.”