Making the smart vision a reality

German engineering and electronics giant Bosch is calling for a “new conception of the city” as it unveils smart solutions for improved air quality, greater security and smart parking.

“One key factor here is technologies that make cities smart and worth living in. In the long run, cities without intelligence will not survive, but succumb to gridlock,” said Stefan Hartung, Bosch management board member, speaking at the company’s press conference at CES 2018 in Las Vegas.

According to a study conducted on behalf of Bosch, the smart city market is predicted to grow 19 per cent annually between now and 2020, reaching a volume of $800bn (Euro 680bn).

“For a long time, the smart city was a vision. We’re helping make it reality,” said Hartung. The company claims it is currently involved in 14 “extensive” smart city projects in locations including San Francisco, Singapore, Tianjin, Berlin, and Stuttgart.

Within the past two years, the company has doubled its sales from cross-domain projects to nearly one billion euros, and this figure is set to rise further.

From January 9 to 12, the supplier of technology and services will be presenting many new solutions that make cities smart at CES 2018, the world’s largest electronics show.

Among the new solutions Bosch will be presenting at CES, range from a new compact unit that measures and analyses air quality in real time, to a system that digitally monitors river water levels and gives early warning of flood risks, to a completely automatic parking space service that aims to make drivers’ lives easier.

Air quality is one of the greatest challenges cities face, according to Bosch, but thanks to smart technologies, cities can take faster and more targeted action to improve it.

The company’s Climo microclimate monitoring system, developed in partnership with Intel, measures and analyses 12 parameters that are important for air quality, including carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, temperature, and relative humidity.

Bosch said the appliance is one-hundredth the size of conventional systems – and one-tenth the cost.

Meanwhile, its community-based parking solution aims to help simplify the search for a suitable space. As they drive by, cars automatically recognise and measure the size of the gaps between parked cars, transmitting the data in real time to a digital map.

In this way, drivers can have themselves guided directly to free parking spaces. Bosch is already testing this service in German cities, including Stuttgart. This year, the company claims, as many as 20 US cities will follow, including Los Angeles, Miami, and Boston.

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