Glendale SmartBeats (Tech)
The Arizona State University Smart City Cloud Innovation Center Powered by AWS (ASU CIC) recently collaborated with the City of Glendale, Arizona to improve the process for designing and maintaining patrol areas.
Glendale aims to be able to provide a safe and timely response to calls for service. Today this process is done manually and relies on the personal knowledge of those who make the schedule and can be time consuming if an officer must take a sudden leave of absence and the scheduler must make several calls in order to find a replacement. This process can evolve with SmartBeats, an artificial intelligence technology that can assist in scheduling police patrol areas.
Problem
Each year the Glendale Police Department updates their patrol beats in order to improve response times and ensure that resources are placed where they are needed. As Glendale grows and changes, the needs of the community change. One area may have higher rates of traffic than it did last year, slowing down response time, or something else may have changed that makes it harder for Glendale Police to serve their community. This year they approached the Arizona State University Smart City Cloud Innovation Center (ASU CIC) for a solution in restructuring the beats. The ASU CIC seeks to build a solution that produces beat schedules that optimize response time and puts resources that are needed.
Approach
Using data, analytics, and artificial intelligence technologies, the ASU CIC will produce SmartBeats, a cloud-based software prototype that takes into account factors such as traffic, available resources, number of phone calls, and more in order to create optimal options for police schedules and beats. SmartBeats will help optimize schedules in less than optimal conditions, such as when an officer is out on leave. It can also help officers accomplish the department goal of spending a third of their time responding to calls, another third doing administrative tasks, and the final third being available and engaging with their community. The goal is to ensure a safe and timely response, provide more resources to communities, and increase community engagement to build better relationships with the community.
NOTE: the Press Release is a visioning tool used to develop and share the idea for SmartBeats. This is not an official City Press Release for media distribution.
Supporting Artifacts
Click here to see the prototype on GitHub.
| SMARTBEATS PRFAQ | Press Release and FAQ |
| SMARTBEATS VISUAL |
Watch the demo of the project below:
Next Steps
The ASU CIC has handed off the prototype to the Glendale Police and Information Technology Departments to build the SmartBeats prototype. Once the prototype is built, it will be used by the Glendale Police Department to inform the way they schedule their patrol areas or “beats”. Below is a video of Sameet, one of our talented student developers describing the prototype.
About the ASU CIC
The ASU Smart Cities Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) is a strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is supported by AWS on ASU’s Innovation campus - SkySong. The mission of the CIC is to drive Innovation Challenges that materially benefit the greater Phoenix metro area and beyond. The CIC will do this by solving pressing community and regional challenges, using shareable and repeatable technology solutions from ideation through prototype, as a service for the greater human good.
The CIC also provides real-world problem-solving experiences to students by immersing them in the application of proven innovation methods in combination with the latest technologies to solve important challenges in the public sector.
The challenges being addressed cover a wide variety of topics including homelessness, water conservation, vandalism, pedestrian safety, digital service delivery and many others. The CIC leverages the deep subject matter expertise of government, education and non-profit organizations to clearly understand the customers affected by public sector challenges and develops solutions that meet the customer needs.
For more information on the ASU CIC, to read about projects or to submit a challenge, please visit https://smartchallenges.asu.edu.