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In the city there are infrastructures that handle electricity, heat, gas and fiber. Should there be disturbances in these structures, it often causes problems for citizens. The SOM project tested the benefits of connected sensors for the critical infrastructure, which is managed by the municipal company Kraftringen in Lund.

“Kraftringen is part of the Smart Public Environments project to learn more about IoT and the opportunities it can provide for us as an energy company and for our customers,” said Håkan Skarrie, business developer at Kraftringen, at the beginning of the project. IoT can be of great benefit by enabling monitoring and control to increase the quality of delivery and increased resource efficiency in the network.

In autumn 2019, twenty cable cabinets around Mårtenstorget in Lund were provided with equipment to test a sensor network that communicates via Bluetooth mesh. Sensors were installed in the electrical cabinets to measure, among other things, temperature and acceleration, both to monitor the cabinets and to test the operation of the new communication network. Acceleration can show whether a door is open or if the cabinet is damaged by, for example, being hit. Temperature is important in order to quickly get indications of an overheating. With this, Kraftringen gained better control of the cabinets and maintenance could also be made more efficient.

In each cabinet there is also equipment that turns the cabinet into a node in the mesh network. From the mesh network, the data is then forwarded via the LoRa network located in Lund, but also via Telia's NB-IoT to a platform.

- We want to evaluate different technologies, but for you we focus primarily on Bluetooth mesh, said Håkan Skarrie. We believe it could be a cost-effective solution for hooking up a lot of equipment in the city.

One idea was to also use the mesh network to connect sensors to monitor the Power Ring's infrastructure for heat, gas, fibre and electric vehicle charging. Then the possibility of building a network in the city for sensor communication through a mesh network was seen in the 15,000 cable cabinets in the city.

Many companies and organizations collaborated in the project. In addition to Kraftringen and Future By Lund, u-blox, which manufactures the hardware for communications, and ABB, which manufactures cable cabinets, develops the equipment to be inserted into the cable cabinets. The sensors were connected to Sensative's IoT platform Yggio, which manages data and sensors. Vinnergi was responsible for measurements and various tests. MiThings and DeviceRadio did the software development required for all the parts to talk to each other and Mobile Heights was responsible for getting the entire testbed together so that everything worked, from sensors to service.

“Thanks to the cooperation between the municipality and the business community, we have managed to create a unique solution that can be the first step to building the city's new digital infrastructure,” says Anders Trana, project manager for the SOM project. The new grid can provide a basic infrastructure to connect different things, enabling many new solutions in the city.

What was the result?

A BT MeshNätet consisting of 18 nodes of which a gateway has been built in central Lund, around Mårtenstorget. The solution was demonstrated by U-blox at the Utility Week fair in Paris 2019

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How is the project taken forward?

The mesh network is kept running. There are currently no plans to expand the monitoring of the cable cabinets, but possible future sensor projects around Mårtenstorget, e.g. within the project Lund Open Sensing City, may use the network for communication.

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Critical Infrastructure Facts

A sub-project of the SOM project funded by IoT Sweden that ran between September 2017 and December 2020.

Project Time: 2018-02-01 - 2019-05-25

Project Manager: Håkan Skarrie, Kraftringen

Project partners: Kraftringen, U-blox, MiThings, Mobile Heights, T-maps, DeviceRadio, ABB, Vinnergi, Lund Municipality

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