regio iT and Staex are building a prototype for a Smart City dashboard
2022-02-22
Andrew Heimerman
Lead Solutions Engineer
As the largest municipal IT service provider in North Rhine—Westphalia, regio iT GmbH is currently in the process of bringing together different urban infrastructures in an easy-to-use mobility dashboard.
German Cities are moving forward towards full digitalization of their city-wide technologies to provide citizens with accessible and transparent dashboards.
Germany is looking to the future, and model municipalities are becoming pioneers in the field of smart cities: by connecting parking spaces, charging stations for electric vehicles, public transport and much more, these cities want to provide their citizens with intelligent information about the mobility options in their region in the future. As the largest municipal IT service provider in North Rhine-Westphalia, regio iT GmbH is currently in the process of bringing together these different urban infrastructures in an easy-to-use mobility dashboard.
A city connected with its citizens
On the way to work at seven in the morning: traffic is already jammed on the feeder roads. So there is time to take a look at the mobility dashboard. Where is the problem? Too much individual traffic, the parking spaces on the sides of the road near the workplace are 99% occupied and the multi-storey car park is at 80% capacity. But: at the same time, bus ticket prices are falling and bicycles are also available. Take a bicycle? Given the 9 am appointment, that could be tight. So: off to the commuter car park and on to the bus. Dreams of the future? Soon no longer.
Devices and software used in pilot cities are provided by many different partners. Linking these IT components has proven to be a major challenge for conventional IT management solutions in the past. Therefore, regio iT has now teamed up with the start-up Staex GmbH: The young company offers a completely new and innovative platform that makes it possible to connect and orchestrate the devices in a highly distributed environment in a very straightforward way - exactly what is needed in a smart city. With Staex, all devices in the smart city can communicate seamlessly with each other. In addition, the software used by regio iT, the municipality as well as the hardware partners is easy to manage, without the need for a central management service. This also means that the pilot cities are scalable for future cooperation between the partners and the administration and that the service for the citizens can be further expanded in the future.
Furthermore, the dashboard provides the municipality itself and its administration with important information on traffic, breakdowns and other data that are indispensable for sustainable urban planning.
Connecting people and technologies
regio iT chose Staex as the platform provider because of the simplicity of setup and flexibility: within just a few days, Staex can be set up on any Linux-based platform and connected to the existing infrastructure. Regardless of how the city progresses with its smart city rollout, new devices can be added quickly and easily and provide new data for the citizen dashboard.
With Staex, we are moving into the future together. Its advanced solution gives us an enormous competitive advantage while reducing costs — combined with sustainable computing. This also convinces our customers.
Dr Alexandra Mikityuk, the CEO of Staex, is also convinced that this cooperation sets the course.
In such fragmented IT landscapes as Smart Cities with public and private sectors, multiple providers and a multitude of IoT device, it is almost impossible to harmonise the landscape with existing solutions to seamlessly build IoT services and collect data. In addition, secure and resilient Smart City services need to be created for the future. Together with regio iT, we have confirmed this and are working to create a truly new model for smart city infrastructures.
After completing the first three-month phase of the project, the teams are looking forward to continued collaboration and advancing Smart Cities.
Contact
- regio iT gesellschaft für informationstechnologie mbh:
Mirja Niewerth-Halis
Lombardenstraße 24, 52070 Aachen
tel +49 (0)241 413 59 9698
@regioit.de - Staex GmbH:
Paksy Plackis-Cheng, CSO
c/o Unicorn
Am Neuen Markt 9 e-f
14467 Potsdam
@staex.io
About Staex
Staex is a secure public network for IoT devices that can not run a VPN such as smart meters, IP cameras, and EV chargers. Staex encrypts legacy protocols, reduces mobile data usage, and simplifies building networks with complex topologies through its unique multi-hop architecture. Staex is fully zero-trust meaning that no traffic is allowed unless specified by the device owner which makes it more secure than even some private networks. With this, Staex creates an additional separation layer to provide more security for IoT devices on the Internet, also protecting other Internet services from DDoS attacks that are usually executed on millions of IoT machines.
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