Smart Cities, Cars, Highways and parking bays- a plethora of interconnected devices promising answers to today's' congested and polluted cities.
There is a case to be made that success will be ultimately achieved by those organisations that own the technology stacks. Not just the parking systems, or vehicle hire companies, auto manufacturers, municipal authorities or large technology vendors.
Data is the kingpin and the technology stacks that join, analyse and enable decision making from these disparate, multiple, real-time data sources may change the traditional relationships that have driven progress to date
A sensor is built into a parking space and another sensor is built into a car: one network enables the municipality to charge the driver for parking; another allows the driver to find an empty parking space. Richer networks will eventually enable an autonomous car to navigate and park itself. Still richer networks will enable cars to self-organize into “platoons,” lines of cars like a train that are given high-speed priority by smart traffic lights. Physical cars swarm on an infrastructure of roads, virtual agents swarm on an infrastructure of data: each is a layered system and they continuously modify one another. Modularity and layering, granularity and extensibility, the symbiosis of the very large with very small: these are the recurrent themes of the transformative technologies of our era.