Public Administration 4.0

IoT solutions for the public sector

We have previously dealt with the topic of smart city, a technologically advanced city that can optimize, provide efficient and sustainable solutions and activities within a city.

There are many initiatives to digitalize cities. In Italy, the Piano Nazionale Ripresa e Resilienza, PNRR, aims to implement a real evolution from a digital and ecological point of view.

The now known Public Administration 4.0 is a set of services offered to citizens based on the use of the Internet. This concept is under development today. The Public Administration, in fact, is implementing IT systems to ensure that the various services can be provided more quickly without major complications to all Italian citizens.

Safety and speed are therefore fundamental aspects that revolve around PA 4.0 and that must coexist so that everything goes smoothly. One example of this is the services offered to citizens when they have to submit applications on behalf of a disabled relative or in other similar situations. In any case, this kind of implementations should provide opportunities for citizens to take advantage of this new system without having to replace the old method.

At the basis of Public Administration 4.0 there is a direct relationship with the citizen, thanks to online communication that offers a range of information.

The growing digitalization of infrastructures can create great opportunities in water service management by introducing innovative digital solutions. These initiatives address many of the challenges in the water sector. IoT solutions would first lead to an efficient use of energy thanks to the optimization and control of the various energy-consuming components of networks and plants. Secondly, it would allow asset management, long-term planning and predictive maintenance and replacement.

Systems that allow remote reading and remote management of water meters are indispensable in the water sector. The Water Smart Metering is a device that allows you to reduce the costs of readings that can be performed automatically remotely, and more frequently, without on-site intervention by the operator. A device able to improve customer awareness in relation to their consumption by promoting the rational use of resources.

LoRaWAN is the optimal solution in the Smart Water Metering sector as it has the ability to penetrate “deep indoors” by finding multiple quantities on water meters and on the most important indicators of the aqueduct network.

The aim is to control and reduce water waste thanks to near-real-time monitoring, and to provide individual users with daily consumption data, in perspective of clarity and awareness.

The Public Administration is one of the largest consumers of energy in Italy. The consumption of the PA is largely linked to the large building stock owned on the national territory, which we deal with, in addition to public lighting, transport and service facilities such as energy plants or waste treatment plants.

With the growing digitalization of infrastructures, there is great interest on the part of service managers in introducing innovative digital solutions. Thanks to this, numerous benefits can be obtained in terms of business, especially in energy efficiency contexts. In fact, it is possible to optimize and control the various energy-intensive components of networks and plants, and also manage assets by planning their maintenance and possible replacement in a long-term and predictive manner.

To achieve these objectives, the Metering devices allow service managers to centrally manage energy, water and gas consumption by remotely monitoring the meters.

In sustainable cities, urban lighting does not pollute and does not waste energy.

Traditional systems use obsolete sources, have frequent failures and much higher consumption than the standards available today that use new technologies. The Public Administration can transform urban lighting into a smart and multifunctional high-efficiency infrastructure with excellent energy savings.

The lighting devices, through the Cloud centralized control system, can be individually controlled and configured to reproduce specific lighting programs (for example in the case of events in the squares) or through the astronomical switch function.

The latter allows the system to configure switching on and off based on sunrise and sunset times. The exact timing of switching on and off is determined by latitude, longitude, time zone and by the surrounding area (mountains, hills, etc.).

Within a city it is essential to check the environmental parameters. What is becoming increasingly important is the ability to provide systems that are able to prevent certain situations, so that PAs can organize precise actions to comply with predefined environmental parameters.

Data, for example, on traffic, on the use of a certain service, on air quality or those relating to the geolocation of infrastructures (such as parking lots, charging stations for electric vehicles, etc.), on the frequency of transit of vehicles transport or other, allow you to understand the state of health of the city, monitoring its problems. Having a complete picture that outlines the situation of a center allows you to understand how to improve its services and its environmental impact.

For these types of structured analysis and monitoring, a smart city must be able to rely on IoT sensor networks. Wireless technologies are fundamental in this scenario as they allow communication between objects through IoT communication protocols.

Creating correlations between an event of any nature and a series of implementations on different subsystems already present in the field, allows you to define specific organizational decisions and plans, satisfying different needs.