Telelink Business Services partners with GATE in establishing a better city living environment through big data collection

GATE (the Big Data for Smart Society Institute) is the first Centre of Excellence in Bulgaria focusing on Big Data and AI applied research. 

Telelink Business Services partners with Sofia Municipality and GATE in constructing a fundament for an improved smart city living environment. The project is based on big data gathering and interacts with various city subsystems to provide new insights.   Our ambition is to pave the way for true digital transformation in Sofia and convert the capital city into a smart one.

EU’s extensive initiative to transform our cities into smart ones through digital technologies includes various types of projects.  GATE project’s partners Chalmers Tekniska Högskola in Gothenburg and Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” aim to deliver intelligent sustainable digital solutions for the residents.   

In this partnership, Telelink Business Services plays a vital role in the delivery and deployment of IoT (Internet of Things) devices for the pilot region of Lozenets in Sofia. Those are used to measure key elements of the city environment. Currently, the installation of 131 devices is completed and they collect detailed and structured big data.  The measurements function as a fundament of deeper analysis that will ground new smart city scenarios. Except for the technical devices, Telelink Business Services delivers a software platform efficiently distributing the data so decisions can be made fast.    

The complete IoT solution has two main components: data sensing devices and IoT Analytical Platform:

Data Sensing Devices, providing high-quality data to feed the Digital Twin Mode:

• 12 Air Quality Stations that measure the key air quality indicators and environmental parameters. These include PM10, PM2.5, PM1, NO2, SO2, O3, noise level, wind speed, wind direction, rainfall, temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure.    
• 60 Noise Monitoring Stations provide high-density measurement of noise levels and peak noise levels.   
• 50 People Counting Stations providing count on passers-by in certain locations of interest.    
• High-Resolution Imaging Lidar sensors, scanning the environment, detecting all moving objects, and transforming the collected information for further analysis.  

IoT Analytical platform was developed in accordance with the project requirements to collect and control all data sources. It contains:   

• Connect & Command Layer – provides service interfaces for connecting IoT devices to the back end and interacting with them remotely through protocols such as MQTT and HTTP-    
• Digital Twin Layer – provides a virtual abstraction of the IoT devices, where all device’s data is synchronized in real-time with the physical device.   
• Telemetry Processing Layer – provides custom business workflows for processing the data into different aggregation sets and alarm generations.   

• Web Portal Layer – provides easy-to-use access to all features provided by the solution with insightful graphs built with chart.js and Grafana.    

Telelink Business Services collects and processes real-time data, closely collaborating with GATE for further improvements of the current system. The project is ongoing, and all future progress will be closely followed.