No. 112: Applying TRON to the smart city in alliance with European research Institutes (December 10, 2011)

YRP Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory sponsored by Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Sony will play the central role in the research to apply the Real-Time Operating System Nucleus (TRON) that Dr. Takeshi Sakamura proposed in 1984 to the smart city. The laboratory will establish an organization with government-affiliated research institutes and companies in Europe including Siemens of Germany and ST Microelectronics of Switzerland to put TRON-based technologies into practical use. It has already reached an agreement with a Chinese city on the technological cooperation on TRON. It will help the Chinese city establish a TRON-based security system that covers the entire city including the historical management of pharmaceuticals and foods. Likewise, it will provide the know-how on incorporating TRON in various kinds of sensors to European organizations.

The smart meter (next-generation power meter) is used in the smart city to network various devices to exchange data in search of the optimal power supply. A sophisticated operating system is vital to know the city environment in real time, and TRON is regarded as the best operating system. According to a Japanese public research company, the world smart meter market will grow more than three times over the level in 2009 to 1,300 billion yen in 2020. TRON will have increasingly intensifying competition with Android of Google and Windows of Microsoft. TRON plans to differentiate it from other two operating systems by focusing on devices that do not need a large processing ability. At present, no clear winner in the world’s standard of the operating system for sophisticated sensors vital to the smart city.