Situational Awareness in Megacities

Abstract

Each day an estimated 180,000 people across the globe migrate to cities. By 2030 cities will account for 60% of the world’s population. Cities with populations of ten million or more are called megacities. The problems found in megacities and other urban environments – explosive growth rates, vast and growing income disparity, and a security environment that is increasingly attractive to the politically dispossessed – present great challenges to national and international security. Therefore, monitoring these cities will become increasingly important to provide decision makers with effective predictors of looming instability. The urban environment is becoming increasingly more connected and complex. In the coming decades, we will be surrounded by billions of sensors, devices and machines, the Internet of Things (IoT). Cities and urban areas that benefit from the IoT are commonly referred to as Smart Cities. Based on the rise of IoT adoption around the world, future intelligence techniques for megacities will rely, in part, on Smart City technologies. To this end, there is a need for a common framework that captures military operations, urban operations, emergency response operations, and city behavior. By creating such a framework, the sharing of information and common understanding of instabilities in megacities can be recognized and communicated across different operational needs. With a common intelligence framework, a variety of technologies - data analytics, sensor fusion, augmented reality, cyber security, 3D tracking, and predictive modeling - can be developed to provide situational awareness on the many dimensions of megacities.