A single traffic jam, power cut, or hospital queue is not just a problem in itself—it is a symptom of a deeper failure: cities manage their water, energy, transport, and waste systems in isolation, even though these systems constantly affect one another. This matters because urban populations are growing, and the old approach of tackling each service separately is becoming more expensive and more painful. Peak demand for electricity, for example, forces costly infrastructure upgrades that could be avoided if demand were spread more evenly—but congestion charging for roads currently ignores the knock-on effects on energy use, hospital waiting times, or supermarket crowding. The gap is that no one has yet built the tools to see and manage these interactions as a whole. If this research succeeds, it will create a digital framework that integrates data from multiple city systems—sensors, models, analytics, and web services—to optimise them together. The potential impact is cheaper infrastructure, fewer outages, less congestion, and new digital service businesses that could not exist before. The project also tackles the business models and consumer behaviour needed to make those services financially viable.
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City infrastructure has evolved through many vintages of technology; its various components are not efficiently connected and configured. Utilities and services using this infrastructure often operate sub-optimally, constraining development of new value-added services. Digital technologies enhance our ability to collect appropriate data and conduct analysis at a systemic level, thereby enhancing efficiency and allowing valuable new service businesses to emerge for the first time. This enhances quality of life, making our cities more globally competitive and providing opportunities for new jobs, both within existing companies and because entirely new companies have been empowered to spring up. One simple application is the problem of managing peak demand for infrastructure, whether for energy, waste, water, or transport. Peaky demand requires the provision of expensive infrastructure, the need for which can be avoided if demand can be spread more evenly. Failure to resolve this issue leads to costly symptoms such as traffic congestion or power outages. As urban populations expand, these problems are becoming more apparent and pressing. At present, those responsible for urban services attempt to resolve each of these problems in isolation - for example, congestion charging for transport takes no account of effects thereby induced on demand peaks for energy, implied effects on the bunching of hospital services, or whether congestion in supermarkets is thereby reduced or exacerbated. When systems interact as much as this, optimization at a higher level will yield important efficiency gains - cheaper costs, additional leisure time, better quality of life - making such cities more attractive places for businesses and consumers.Developments in pervasive sensing, large-scale modelling, new analytical and optimisation techniques and web services technologies offer a new wave of opportunities to re-think an integrated urban infrastructure. New markets for digital services will grow from the ability to integrate, analyse, model, and act upon data from multiple sources. Making this happen in reality also requires progress in the understanding of business models, consumer behaviour at a systemic level, and the prototyping of service innovation to accelerate the development of financially viable new services. This proposal seeks to create understanding at each stage in this chain, and to validate the benefits thereby obtained.
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