From Smart Buildings and Cities to Smart Living

We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom said the two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize Edward Osborne Wilson. We are attached 24 hours to our “smart” phone that gets us closer to those who are far away and keeps us apart from those who are near, and we want to live in “smart” buildings and “smart” cities where systems are used and data can be gathered to save energy, create comfortable ambiances, regulate traffic, or deal with our waste products, but we surely need to reconsider what “Smart” living is all about. From the roman empire to the actual high-rise buildings, through the modern movement leaded by Le Corbusier, each time has used the technology available, but neither of the great master pieces of architecture and urbanism is remembered by the technology that made it possible but by Its ability to seduce the minds, hearts and souls of its habitants and the generations that came after them. It is essential to know that we truly need, to clarify WHY and WHAT FOR we do things before we solve or engage ourselves in HOW we make it happen.

BESTest for Integrated Outdoor-Indoor Energy Balance Modelling

In our growing cities, climate change and energy related uncertainties are of great concern. The impact of the Urban Heat Island on comfort, health and the way we use energy still requires further clarification. The outdoor-indoor energy balance model (3D-City Irradiance) presented in this article was developed so as to address these issues. The effects of view factors between urban surfaces on three-dimensional radiation and the effects of fully integrated outdoor-indoor energy balance schemes on heat islands and building indoor thermal loads could be included within different building blocks at a resolution of several metres. The model operated under the ‘stand alone’ mode. It was tested using the Building Energy Simulation Test (BESTest) which demonstrated good levels of agreement for diurnal and seasonal simulations.

A New Approach of Smart Mobility for Heavy Goods Vehicles in Casablanca

Managing mobility, both of people and goods, in cities is a thorny issue. The travel needs of urban populations are increasing and put pressure on transport infrastructure. The Moroccan cities are no exception and will struggle, in the short term, to respond to the challenges of the acceleration of the phenomenon of urbanization and the increase in demand for mobility. This will inevitably prevent them from turning into smart cities. The term smart certainly alludes to better use of technologies, but smart mobility is also defined as “a set of coordinated actions intended to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and environmental sustainability of cities” [1]. The term mobility highlights the preponderance of humans over infrastructure and vehicles. Faced with traffic congestion, the solutions currently adopted which consist of fitting out and widening the infrastructures, only encourage more trips and report the problem with more critical consequences. It is true that beyond a certain density of traffic, even Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) are not useful. The concept of dynamic lane management or Advanced Traffic Management (ATM) opens up new perspectives. Its objective is to manage and optimize road traffic in a variable manner, in space and in time. This article is a summary of the development of a road infrastructure dedicated to Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGV), the first of its kind in Morocco. It aims to avoid the discomfort caused by trucks in the urban road network of the city of Casablanca. This research work is an opportunity to reflect on the introduction of ITS and ATM to ensure optimal use of existing infrastructure before embarking on heavy and irreversible infrastructure projects.

A Smart Campus Template

We highlight a lack of models and theories associated with the Smart Campus concept and also an absence of processes to support its design and development. This paper provides a first approach to a theory and a set of design principles to guide their development. The theory and principles are flexible enough to be easily adapted and adopted by any organization interested in developing a Smart Campus.

Perception of Security Issues in the Development of Cloud-IoT Systems by a Novice Programmer

It is very hard (or ineffective) to take an old system and add to it security features like plug-ins. Therefore, a computer system is much more reliable designed with the approach of security-by-design. Nowadays, there are several tools, middlewares, and platforms designed with this concept in mind, but they must be appropriately used to guarantee a suitable level of reliability and safety. A security-by-design approach is fundamental when creating a distributed application in the IoT field, composed of sensors, actuators, and cloud services. The IoT usually requires handling different programming languages and technologies in which a developer might not be very expert. Through a use case, we analyzed the security of some IoT components of Amazon Web Services (AWS) from a novice programmer’s point of view. Even if such a platform could be secure by itself, a novice programmer could do something wrong and leave some possible attack points to a malicious user. To this end, we also surveyed a small pool of novice IoT programmers from a consulting engineering company. Even if we discovered that AWS seems quite robust, we noticed that some common security concepts are often not clear or applied, leaving the door open to possible issues.

Low Power LoRa Transmission in Low Earth Orbiting Satellites

In the recent past, a modulation technique called “LoRa” has become popular in the communication industry due to its long range capabilities with low power consumption, a few satellites have carried LoRa and worked successfully inspite of being skeptical about Doppler shift, packet loss, etc. This paper discusses the preliminary results of LoRa communications established from a recently launched cubesat. Satish Dhawan Satellite (SD Sat) is a 3U Cubesat built by Space kidz India, weighing 1.9 kg, it carried a radiation counter and magnetometer as its payload. It carried a LoRa transmitter which transmits beacon at 100 mW. It is also transmitting FSK RTTY and CW RTTY. The satellite was launched into sun-synchronous orbit at 510 × 498 km. Multiple ground stations around the world have confirmed the signal reception.

Computational Approaches for Urban Design Within the MENA Region

This paper focuses on the use of computational tools to develop a data driven approach for an analytical study about different urban systems. This “framework” examines urban Big Data in the old medina of Sale in Morocco. The computational tools are more effective to provide insights within complexity, becoming a key to generate more efficient solutions throughout the design process. The findings of this study highlight the potential of a data driven approach to explore analytical aspects and move further to generative design using algorithms.

Personalized Circadian Light: A Digital Siblings Approach

In this paper, we introduce a human-centric lighting control system optimized to support sleep and circadian coordination. We present an approach to optimize lighting that combines a “digital siblings” approach, i.e., a stochastic extension of a digital twin. It estimates and optimizes parameters in experimentally validated models of circadian and sleep regulation with a novel optimization algorithm for optimal timing of light exposure. We acknowledge that people have varying preferences for the lighting levels throughout the day based on their personal preferences and schedules and explicitly include this as a key parameter in our optimization strategy. Our results show that with the suggested lighting schedules, alignment of circadian rhythmicity to the desired sleep-wake schedule can be achieved with minimal disruption to people’s daily lives.