Smart Community Design

Hiroaki Nishi (Professor, Department of System Design Engineering)

In recent years, a succession of terms related to social innovation have emerged, such as "sustainable society" and "resilient society." Terms prefixed with "smart" are particularly noticeable, and the support of information and communication technology is indispensable for making society smarter. For example, the smart grid is an initiative that introduces information and communication technology (ICT) into the power infrastructure to enhance its functionality, sophistication, and integration. Smarter systems using ICT are being advanced in various areas, including building structures, road traffic, administrative services, and medical services. As the use of ICT has become widespread, information exchanged within infrastructure and services is now aggregated in the cloud, which can be said to have increased the freedom of its use. Although this information is generated by different infrastructures, integrating it has the potential to provide more attractive services. Efforts to intensively make town and city infrastructures smarter and provide integrated, community-based services are also gaining momentum. This is what we call a smart community or a smart society.

I am currently engaged in demonstration projects for smart communities. In the Green Society ICT Life Infrastructure project in Kurihara City, Miyagi Prefecture, I have been involved in building and operating an energy management system for municipal facilities and general households. Additionally, I serve as the chairman of the Smart Town Consortium in Nasushiobara City, Tochigi Prefecture; Urawa Misono, Saitama City; and Musashi-Kosugi, Kawasaki City. In Urawa Misono and Musashi-Kosugi, initiatives that leverage the unique characteristics of each area have actually begun. In the Nagasaki EV & ITS project on the Goto Islands of Nagasaki Prefecture, we worked on building a smart island centered on electric vehicles. Because these are demonstration projects, they involve difficulties that go beyond academic research. We must devise ways to make smart living, including eco-friendly practices, accessible to everyone from children to the elderly. This requires providing simpler interfaces and constant support. There are also various constraints from the perspective of ethical regulations. However, I believe that solving these issues is of the utmost importance in realizing smart communities.

In a smart community, it is important to focus on various regional services such as healthcare, energy, agriculture, weather, local administration, and disaster prevention, and to provide community-based services in collaboration with surrounding commercial facilities and companies. I would like to briefly describe some potential services. In Kurihara City, it became possible to predict the number of heatstroke cases from trends in patient numbers and weather information, allowing for application in designing medical services based on these predictions. Similarly, it is also possible to forecast electricity demand and the number of days with tight power supply from weather information and power demand data. In our initiatives with home energy management systems (HEMS), we are evaluating comfort by introducing various environmental sensors with the aim of achieving an eco-friendly lifestyle without undue effort. We found that there are individual differences in the discrepancy between these sensor values and comfort survey responses. This difference could also be interpreted as representing the risk of heatstroke. The fusion of such heterogeneous infrastructures is expected to lead to the provision of various new services.

A key element in this process is a new information infrastructure that can efficiently collect data from the vast number of sensors embedded in society and efficiently convert it into services. Therefore, we are also conducting research on enhancing the functionality of information networks. Furthermore, while smart community initiatives often involve personal information, many of the services provided do not specifically require it; knowing general trends is often sufficient. I believe that by discovering new methods for information collection, anonymization, and provision using ICT, we can develop attractive services while minimizing the collection of personal information, and we are advancing related research. Additionally, I participate in the IEEE Standards Association and ITU-T, working on the technical standardization of these technologies. Now, as society is on the verge of significant change, I believe it is time to put our minds together to determine what ICT can do to create a new society.