From large metropolitan areas to rural towns, cities of all sizes face significant and diverse challenges in today’s world.
A recent 2024 survey conducted on 250 cities around the world by Thoughtlab, determined that the primary challenges faced by the cities are climate change followed by public health, affordable housing, crime and public safety, pollution and aging infrastructure.
At Itron, we have collaborated with more than 8,000 city and utility customers globally, so we deeply understand many of the common problems that they face. We know that it takes more than technology to balance competing economic, environmental and social priorities.
Building on the success of our trusted smart streetlighting solutions, Itron has recently unveiled CityEdge. The CityEdge architecture enables integration of smart lighting, smart sensors via intelligent connectivity on a single platform, providing better decision-making through real-time data analysis and actionable insights. Designed as an open, flexible platform with a global partner ecosystem, CityEdge combines proven results with advanced IoT technologies, empowering cities and utilities to tackle today’s challenges. The Itron CityEdge portfolio takes urban innovation to the next level.
Itron’s CityEdge portfolio can help address challenges and deliver results in the following domains:
Optimized Smart Lighting
Inefficient legacy streetlights can represent up to 40% of a city’s energy bill and a significant carbon footprint. As cities adopt more efficient LED-based lighting, the CityEdge platform can measure energy consumption, schedule or adjust streetlight dimming in real-time, calculate carbon savings, enable adaptive lighting based on real-time conditions and receive notifications of faulty lights.
Increased Public Safety
The need to uphold and increase public safety intensifies in sync with growing cities. That’s why CityEdge monitors and detects safety-related events, such as traffic incidents, damaged utility or streetlight poles and excessive noise, through Itron’s real-time asset monitoring system. Cities can also use flood sensors for real-time alerts on flood risks.
Reduced Traffic and Highway Congestion
The World Health Organization’s latest report on road safety reveals an alarming lack of progress in advancing laws and safety standards. Cities play a key role in this effort and can achieve a substantial reduction in roadway fatalities. The CityEdge solution portfolio enables continuous monitoring of road conditions and pedestrian and bicycle activity, as well as sewer and gully cleaning monitoring to alert the city of blockages and prevent floods.
Environmental and Sustainability Reporting
Increasing regulatory mandates for carbon reduction and sustainability are requiring cities to modernize their operations. CityEdge provides emissions tracking and reporting capabilities in real-time, in addition to solutions that reduce environmental impact, monitor air quality, identify “heat islands”, and conserve water with Itron’s smart irrigation system.
Access to Energy, Water and Utility Applications
Modern cities need access to a wide range of use cases to effectively address their unique challenges. The CityEdge portfolio establishes the technological foundation for integrating smart devices, electric vehicles and other distributed energy resources on one unified platform—positioning cities to meet the evolving needs of their communities today and in the future.
At Itron, we believe that long-term value comes not only from the quality and interoperability of new, innovative solutions, but also from how the digital infrastructure enables the generation and use of data for current and future use cases. Data is the key to optimizations and better decision making (you can’t manage what you don’t measure). Having established a flexible and robust system for the first use case, the platform can then be utilized to deliver additional solutions to other city challenges and opportunities. This augments the value of the original investment and allows the city to achieve more results with fewer resources.
With Itron CityEdge, the possibilities – and use cases- are endless. Learn more about the Itron CityEdge portfolio today!
