‘SmartLights’ Snag Win at the 2023 Boost Ideation Camp
FREDERICTON — A team of NBCC and UNB students have found an innovative way to reduce idling times and reacceleration emissions at traffic lights. “Spaghetti Coders” were the winners of the Boost 2023 Ideation Camp, held from March 16-20, for their SmartLights Traffic Solution idea which uses real-time data to optimize traffic light operations.
The goal of this year’s Boost: Ideation Camp was to reduce transportation-related community greenhouse gas emissions through innovation. The big advantage of this idea was that it didn’t involve a major behavioural shift, to get results.
“SmartLights proposes a more cost-effective solution to make real-time traffic decisions, reduce wait time at intersections, prioritize certain vehicles like buses, and ultimately lower GhGs,” said Spaghetti Coders team lead, Jeremy Boss in a press release about the win.
“By placing specialized cameras at intersections around the city and collecting data from approaching vehicles, our SmartLights solution will better inform the City of Fredericton about which intersections are causing the most greenhouse gas emissions due to idling and reacceleration.”
A win-win for the City of Fredericton which supports the annual camp. Boost is part of the “Living Lab” approach that the city has taken to address its most pressing climate change, and other data-driven, issues.
“The city created a civic innovation lab called Boost Fredericton a few years ago as we wanted to play a stronger roles in early adoption, working with new technology, startups, kind of fueling the pipeline,” says Laurie Guthrie, Smart City strategist with the City of Fredericton.
That’s where Boost Ideation Camp comes in. Working with the City of Fredericton, the University of New Brunswick, New Brunswick Community College and Black Arcs, a predictive modeling company that has done work with municipalities regarding Smart City technologies, collaborated on the 2023 Boost Ideation Camp.
“We’re identifying what our municipal problems are and our Smart City challenges. And then we give them to post-secondary students, and then they can help us with developing solutions to solve our challenges.”
It’s all a part of the Boost Fredericton Living Lab for Civic Innovation, which includes the LoRaWAN (IoT sensor network), collecting real-time data to help inform decision making in the city.
“We have water sensors, they’re called hydrometric sensors, in the spring we do real-time flood monitoring,” Guthrie explains. “It goes into a public dashboard or map, you can see it on the city’s website…We can monitor flood levels in real time.”
Another project the sensors have been used for is in parking spaces to see if they are in use. That was an initiative taken on as a part of the Smart Cities Challenge in 2018.
“There’s all kinds of applications but essentially, we’re using data to better inform decision making,” Guthrie says. “We need to have better data so that we can inform our infrastructure investments.”
The decision by the city to embrace data and use it for innovation and decision making isn’t lost on the surrounding post-secondary education institutions, including UNB. Dr. Dhirendra Shukla, chair of J Herbert Smith Centre for Technology Management & Entrepreneurship (JHSC) devoted his weekend to volunteering with the event because of the value it provides to the community.
“[Fredericton] was recognised as one of the most entrepreneurial communities in Canada… we’re thinking: how can how can UNB play an important role in innovation, entrepreneurship, and build that sense of community?” says Dr. Shukla.
“How can entrepreneurship play an important role as a catalyst that connects different communities to come together and be innovative?”
He says the university and the city are part of an ecosystem being created in the community to help propel it forward to meet the demands of the future. The Boost Camp is just one of the facets of this ecosystem.
“You’re seeing all of these incubators, accelerators as well as you have large industrial players being involved in smart grid and how we manage our resources better. I think [Boost] is becoming a critical component and [innovation’s] an area that I think we have a lot of strength,” he says.
“As you’ve seen other startups like potential motors that are in the EV space, take off and do amazing things in our region. So I think there’s a lot of reasons that are interesting and exciting things that are happening in our region that [Boost Ideation Camp] could really propel us …and inspire a lot of young people to innovate and find new and interesting solutions.”
Alex Graham is a Huddle reporter in Saint John. Send her your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].