Making Cities and Communities Smarter

To help cities and communities access digital advancements and efficiencies, the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST’s) Global Community Technology Challenge (GCTC) is fostering smart city and Internet of Things (IoT) development and the deployment of standard-based solutions.

The GCTC program is in the Communications Technology Laboratory at NIST and is part of the Smart Connected Systems Division that oversees smart city infrastructure, explained Michael Dunaway, director of the GCTC.

“The U.S. did not have a formal Smart Cities Program,” Dunaway stated. “Cities were doing all kinds of really great projects, but they were all being done independently and there was no real coordination at either a regional or federal level. As a consequence, cities were basically spending a lot of money for a lot of effort, doing one-off projects with no coordination. There was no economies of scale on any of this technology development work."

Dunaway, a graduate of the Naval Academy and a retired Navy captain with a doctorate in systems engineering, has seen the GCTC program grow since its inception. The establishment of the GCTC 10 years ago brought in the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration as key partners, as well as the U.S. Department of State, the International Trade Administration, NASA, the Health Resources and Services Administration, and the U.S. Postal Service, he said.

The GCTC, with its partners, helped smart city stakeholders to include cybersecurity and privacy as primary concerns when building out sensor systems, edge computing, traffic control systems, IoT enterprises, environmental monitoring platforms and systems to support autonomous vehicles, all to help cities and regions become more efficient.

In fostering the innovation, the GCTC acts as a matchmaker and incubator, helping form public-private partnerships to develop the groundbreaking IoT applications for smart cities and communities, Dunaway noted. The GCTC has established so-called action clusters in 200 cities with 500 companies, universities and nonprofits, including locations in the United States and globally in Africa, Asia and Europe.

For example, the GCTC fostered a program in Cumberland, Maryland, that demonstrates a windshield-mounted smartphone system named RoadBotics that enables highway inspectors to drive and collect data on road conditions and employs artificial intelligence to help identify needed repairs. In North Central Indiana, the program organized a consortium across 10 counties to acquire IoT-based testbeds through industry that help to educate workers and make the region’s farming and manufacturing globally competitive, the agency specified. In Syracuse, New York, the GCTC created guidelines for secure cloud services and created smart city applications, such as smart streetlight networks, catch basin monitoring, water metering and other capabilities.

Internationally, the program has helped create a system in Nigeria that converts waste into biofuels, industrial raw materials and organic fertilizers that reduce carbon dioxide and methane emissions. In Italy, the cities of Genoa, Milan and Turin are replicating a multidomain IoT platform to prevent environmental disasters in Genoa, enable efficient parking in Milan and manage waste in Turin.

With smart city development well underway and coordinated at a federal level, the GCTC has now turned to implementing its new Strategic Plan 2024-2026, released on June 29. 
The plan centers around helping cities and communities learn from each other, improve on successes and build consensus for smart city standards. The GCTC will offer a bevy of information across various platforms for communities—large and small—to access, including a central repository of programs and lessons learned from the smart city initiatives. Such a repository at the national level does not yet exist, Dunaway stated.

“Currently, our area of work is in building a collaboration infrastructure system so that communities can share best practices formally through an information-sharing network,” Dunaway stated. “So, one of our major projects is to build an information-sharing and analysis community network and have a repository for all the lessons learned, the information, the technologies and even the best practices and begin cataloging all that information.”

The information-sharing platform, OpenCommons.org, is live and in beta testing, Dunaway said. It already features a library of 300 projects, best practices by city, events, reports and other assets to help smart city and community stakeholders.

“It is about building the kind of platform that would enable cities to contribute information, to come for resources, to find information, and then to coordinate across regions and boundaries in every region of the country,” he stated.

Additionally, to help measure how smart cities and communities are doing, the GCTC is creating key performance indicators. “Another foundational project is to begin standardizing smart city processes,” the director noted. “We are doing this through the development of key performance indicators for smart cities and communities. As a standards framework and measurement organization, this is one of NIST’s specialties. And one of the questions with smart cities, in order to determine success and efficiencies and enable decision-making for priorities, is what do we measure? And how do we measure it in a smart cities context?”

Understanding how to assess progress over time for a smart city or community is vital to its functioning, as it can help support decision-making, Dunaway continued.

“There are political implications at the city and regional level because ultimately, the decisions about what technologies are invested in are decisions that get made by governmental governance—the mayors, city councils and public agency directors,” Dunaway shared. “What they need are the tools to be able to say, ‘We made these decisions, and we have made these investments in technologies, and here is what we are measuring to determine the outcomes and the benefits to the community.’”Such a framework would also help communities face the challenges of the future relative to climate change, population growth, urbanization and technological advancements. 

And now, cities are not NIST’s only focus, Dunaway said. The United States’ vital rural areas need access to the GCTC’s tools as well. 

“One of our other major priorities is expanding the definition of smart cities to include small towns and rural communities and areas in the outlying regions of major urban areas,” he said. “We are talking about human communities at whatever scale and wherever they may be. We are working over the next several years to expand the definition of what we mean by a ‘smart city,’ both in terms of what we mean by smart and in terms of what we mean by city.”

This means building out the related measurement and analytic infrastructure that can support a farming community in determining what they should prioritize as a smart, digitally connected community.

The effort is not without challenges, Dunaway stated. 

“Rural areas by and large don’t have some of the advantages because they don’t have the scale that a city has,” he explained. “So, the decisions that rural communities have to make about how to be efficient in managing their communities looks a little bit different. And they have different priorities, such as agricultural innovation and technology integration.”

The GCTC has 12 working groups, one of which is the Local Community Technology working group that is helping rural areas sort out smart city technology choices. The group is examining the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, GPS-driven farm equipment, using GPS satellite information for terrain mapping and farm process control. “There is a whole range of very high technology and very efficient integration with a very high level of potential,” the director offered. “And I think we are beginning to achieve some of those advances now in the agricultural area.”

Broadband access remains a priority as well for the GCTC, to connect rural areas and Native American communities, especially as a foundational technology for smart communities.

The GCTC is working with NIST’s Public Safety Communications Research Division, which has the goal to expand broadband access for first responder coordination and communications into every region of the country.

“That’s a big initiative,” Dunaway acknowledged. “We’ve already done a large portion of that work in metropolitan areas, but now one of their goals for this year is to expand that into remote communities to include Native American communities. They focus principally on public safety, communications and first responder communications and interoperability. But the problem is very much the same.”

A longer-term effort is to build a GCTC Research Foundation. Dunaway is already working with several organizations to build collaboration with communities and universities to tackle workforce development.

For example, the NIST’s Chips for America program is implementing aspects of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 that calls for the domestic manufacturing of semiconductor chips. Communities will need an advanced manufacturing workforce. Tying NIST’s smart cities initiatives with research universities, community colleges and high schools is a broad goal for the GCTC.

In addition, the GCTC is also tackling public health from a smart cities perspective. To begin, they are hosting an upcoming workshop to bring first responders, emergency managers, city officials and smart city subject matter experts together to define how to develop a whole-community approach to public safety, health and resilience as part of smart city initiatives. “This is really an outgrowth of the work that FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] has done in the National Disaster Recovery Framework,” the director said.

However, it is left to a city to rebuild after a devastating tornado or hurricane.
“And one of the things we want to do in the smart cities arena and as a GCTC project is to begin examining how we build an information technology and decision architecture that would make that rebuilding process more efficient and maybe even standardized,” Dunaway stated.