In 2010 the metropolitan city of Bari embarked on a course of action whose goal was to become a true Smart City, joining the European Smart Cities project that offered rewards to European cities that excel in sustainable develop-ment by sharing knowledge online and urging cities to improve their inhabitants’ quality of life and work, as well as make the cities smarter, more secure and more sustainable.

Part of this broad and ambitious strategic policy of transforming the municipal administration is another important project that in recent years has won a number of awards: M.U.S.I.C.A. for Urban Monitoring through Innovative Solutions for Agile Cities, funded under the European Regional Development Fund Operational Programme 2007/2013.

M.U.S.I.C.A. is an innovative urban tool for monitoring energy, the environ-ment, security and mobility (Urban Control Centre), based on the technologi-cal paradigms of Smart City, Big Data, Open Data and Internet of Things. It is a system that acquires data concerning the city and its inhabitants in order to govern economic and social development and provide the administration with guidelines for making strategic and operational choices.

It is in line with this adopted strategy, based on the use of a monitoring system, that the City of Bari chose to adopt and integrate the new and multifunctional KIRETI SMART CITY platform, developed by SITE S.p.A. to manage proactively and efficiently local urban security and maintenance.

HOW KIRETI CAN BE PART OFAN INNOVATION PROJECT FORA PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: A SMART CITY STORY AT THE METROPOLITAN CITY OF BARI

CITY OF BARI

Client: City of Bari

Region: Apulia

Population: 323,370 inhabitants (2018)

Area: 117,39 Km²

Density: 2.754,68 inhab./Km²

Website: http://www.comune.bari.it/

Smart City projects started: European Smart Cities for Energy Sustainability, a M.U.S.I.C.A. Project (Urban Monitoring through Innovative Solutions for Agile Cities) focusing on energy, security and the environment

Project area: Bari metropolitan area

Project focus: Urban Security and Maintenance

The KIRETI project is thus in line with the City of Bari well-defined strategy to modernise technological sys-tems that are part of the Smart City concept and digit-ise territorial management processes.

More specifically, the City of Bari set for itself a number of special objectives, ranging from integrating into a single platform the different subsystems that contribute to urban security and maintenance; boosting the ex-isting video surveillance system by switching to a more advanced video analysis logic; and digitising and in-tegrating maintenance processes as part of the ex-panded security management.

The City of Bari has already had in place several tech-nological systems it had been using to carry out secu-rity risk prevention and monitoring activities. It actually had a video surveillance system consisting of over 300 cameras managed by the Milestone XProtect Video Management System, plus some license plate read-ers distributed around its territory, and the M.U.S.I.C.A Business Intelligence System which could collect large amounts of data for statistical and forecasting purpos-es from domains that are internal or external to the city administration (divisions, participatory organisations, ENEL, ARPA, smart video surveillance systems, elec-trical and thermal consumption monitoring systems, etc.).

However, that situation had the following limitations:

• The video surveillance and license plate reading subsystems were managed through separate inter-faces and databases that were not communicat-ing either with each other or with the Business Intel-ligence software, contributing to inefficiency in the control room and to limited coordination between data sources;

• The great number of cameras was part of a sys-tem that was based on an analysis after the fact and not on automated real-time and geo-localised analysis to detect alert/alarm events;

• Maintenance processes, an integral part of an ur-ban decorum strategy, were managed in parallel and poorly digitised ways, causing inefficiency in managing service orders and monitoring the quali-ty of maintenance operations.

PROJECT OBJECTIVES

CHALLENGES

SOLUTIONS

INTEGRATING DATA INTO A SINGLE PLATFORM

KIRETI’s “open system” was found to be the best solu-tion for integrating the pre-existing software applica-tions used to manage video surveillance, license plate reading and business intelligence. Indeed, the Smart City platform, with the technical features it offers, can perfectly integrates the Milestone Systems Video Ma-nagement Solution as well as acquire data from the “Targa System” license plate readers through commu-nication sockets that exchange JSON packets, or other standard protocols that facilitate data exchange with third-party software. Specifically, interaction with the M.U.S.I.C.A. was implemented using HTTP RESTful API ar-chitecture. Another element that helped improve user experience for operators of existing systems was the centralised control over diverse functions and their re-presentation on a single operating interface.

Thanks to its investment in the KIRETI solution, the BARI City Administration successfully increased urban secu-rity and rendered territorial control by local police and other law enforcement agencies more efficient by using more advanced video surveillance systems integrated with all other subsystems. At the same time, also the level of maintenance process management was improved, ensuring greater traceability of maintenance work and greater control over the quality of work performed by contractors.

RESULTS

VIDEO ANALYSIS AND ALARM PROTOCOLS

The KIRETI solution increases the security monitoring le-vel while using the existing video surveillance systems by providing a real-time video analysis to detect alert/alarm events, based on their assessed security risk.In fact, the system interacts directly with the Milestone Image Server and can thus capture video streams fed by the cameras both in live and playback modes. In the current phase of the Smart City project, approximately one third of the available video streams (86 out of 300) are covered by the KIRETI platform, where each can be set to detect up to 24 different video analysis criteria (e.g.: intrusion, abandoned objects, wrong driving di-rection, etc.). Upon detecting any of the pre-configured events, the system logs the related data and commu-nicates it to the M.U.S.I.C.A. Business Intelligence system using proprietary APIs.

DIGITALISATION OF MAINTENANCE PROCESSES

In addition to the issues that are strictly related to se-curity, the KIRETI platform was integrated with an Urban Maintenance module, creating a digital infrastructure for the management of maintenance operations that is flexible and easy to run as it is based entirely on the use of a web device. The City Infrastructure and Networks Office could now supply maintenance companies with special mobile apps through which they could recei-ve service orders, monitor in real time the progress of activities, collect construction site documentation and check compliance with contractual deadlines and quality of completed work.

SITE S.p.A.Via del Tuscolano n.15 40128 Bologna, ItalyPh. +39 051 329111www.sitespa.it