AWS Cloud Architecture to Manage Low Emission Zone

AMB implements the Low Emission Zone (LEZ) in Barcelona, which aims at improving the city's air quality, and manages it with the own-developed cloud architecture of Opentrends. As of today, Barcelona’s LEZ is the most extensive in southern Europe.

Challenge

LEZ IoT Platform

The goal was to implement the LEZ (Low Emission Zone) policy restricting the travel of private vehicles with high emission levels within the Barcelona LEZ. AMB needed a system that would allow the management of statistical data extracted from the LEZ.

This data is currently provided by various systems such as:

Cameras distributed in several municipalities of the metropolitan area conducting constantly vehicle license plate readings;
License plate data provided by the DGT (Dirección General de Tráfico);
Real-time alerts on air pollution rise by AMB SCA.

More than two hundred European cities in ten countries such as London, Berlin or Paris have already implemented low-emission zones with restrictions on the most polluting vehicles to preserve the health of their inhabitants.

Solution

Cloud-native web platform running on AWS

Opentrends has implemented AMB-ZBE, a web platform that manages statistical information related to the Low Emission Zone of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB).

Platform main features are:

Integration with the DGT data source to obtain current license plate census;
Integration with the SCCA system (Air Pollution Control System) for detecting pollution episodes;
Integration with DGT (Department of Motor Vehicles) data source to obtain current license plate census,
Storage of readings;
Sanction criteria management applied to a territorial scope;
Management of exemptions applied to a territorial scope;
Data mining.

Technology

Opentrends has based its solution on SDA (Software-defined Architecture) architectures that are especially suitable to be implemented in cloud environments.

SDA's goal is to provide:

An efficient use of resources, providing reduction of CAPEX;
Agility in provisioning and resource allocation, providing rapid service delivery;
Automated operation, providing maintainability and OPEX reduction;

With the backend services using JAVA Spring APIs and REST frontends (Spring boot) using Bootstrap / React JS frameworks, we have built the cloud-native platform with a known and proven technology stack.

The Amazon Cloud (AWS), one of our close partners, has been implemented to promote the use of services from this platform, in line with our SDA approach.

This solution fully supports and takes advantage of the AWS’ infrastructure and full PaaS potential:

Amazon CloudFront
Amazon API GW.
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon QuickSight
Amazon Lambda
Amazon Aurora Serverless

It is a 100% Serverless project.

Results

Impact Metrics

It is a 100% Serverless project
The largest LEZ in southern Europe covering 36mi2
65 active cameras
System processes an average of 3.3+ million vehicles monthly
Registered peaks of 180K vehicles per day during January 2022
81.46K traffic citations issued in Jan 2022

Thanks to Opentrends' implementation of the cloud architecture, AMB not only achieves a technological advantage but also makes an impact on society:

Being at the forefront in Europe regarding the use of new technologies such as IoT and Cloud;
Manage and exploit the data from the license plates of 1.5M vehicles that are expected in a day, as it is the largest Low Emission Zone in Europe today;
Improve the air quality of the citizens of Barcelona.

At a technological level, the milestones achieved are:

Availability, scalability, and performance;
Architecture oriented to business logic;
Separation of business and frontend layers;
Development with autonomous and transversal teams;
Ease of application maintenance.

More information

If you are looking for a technological partner along the journey of creating and implementing a Low Emissions Zone, contact us and we will contribute with our experience and mobility experts. You can also find more information in our brochure about the LEZ.