Upcity: Addressing Urban Problems Through an Integrated System

Current technologies could potentially solve many of the urban problems in today's cities. Many cities already possess cameras, drones, thermometers, pollution air gauges, and other sensors. However, most of these have been designated for use in individual domains within City Hall, creating a maze of individual data domains that cannot connect to each other. This jumble of domains and stakeholders prevents collaboration and transparency. Cities need an integrated system in which data and dashboards can be shared by city administrators to better deal with urban problems that involve several sectors and to improve oversight. This paper presents a model of an integrative system to manage classes of problems within one administrative municipal domain. Our model contains the cyber-physical system's elements: the physical object, the sensors and electronic devices attached to it, a database of collected problems, code running on the devices or remotely, and the human. We tested the model by using it on the recurring problem of potholes in city streets. An AI model for identifying potholes was integrated into applications available to citizens and operators so that they can feed the municipal system with images and the locations of potholes using their cell phone camera. Preliminary results indicate that these sensors can detect potholes with an accuracy of 91% and 99%, depending on the detection equipment used. In addition, the dashboards provide the manager and the citizen with a transparent view of the problems' progress and support for their correct address.