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Tech Firm to Build Real-Life Sim City for Infrastructure Testing

By Rain Noe - September 23, 2011

in Tech | Sustainable Design

An international technology development firm called Pegasus Global Holdings has announced they'll build an entire city, which may occupy up to 20 square miles in the New Mexico desert, that will have everything a city does—except actual people living there. It will be known as The Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation, and will be constructed purely to conduct infrastructure experiments that would be too disruptive to pull off in an actual city.

The Center will resemble a mid-sized American city, including urban canyons, suburban neighborhoods, rural communities and distant localities. It will offer the only of its kind opportunity to replicate the real-world challenges of upgrading existing city infrastructure to that of a 21st Century smart city, operating within a green economy.

...The Center will allow private companies, not for profits, educational institutions and government agencies to test in a unique facility with real world infrastructure, allowing them to better understand the cost and potential limitations of new technologies prior to introduction."Once this fake city is up and running, interested parties would be able to test "positive and negative impacts of smart grid applications...integration of renewable energies for residential, commercial and industrial sectors of the economy...technologies emerging in intelligent traffic systems, next-generation wireless networks, smart grid cyber security and terrorism vulnerability." (No word on whether they'll tackle longstanding urban myths, like what happens when everyone flushes the toilet at the same time.)

The Center, which will be funded by both the government and private investors, which charge testing fees to those using the facilities. The mid-size city will also generate enough real electricity that it can be sold to neighboring communities.

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maks

13 years ago

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I don't understand. If you click through to the Popular Mechanics story, it makes even less sense.

"If it all sounds too crazy, here's a down-to-earth example: Say scientists want to see if a new kind of smart thermostat can make an entire neighborhood more energy efficient. They could hand out the thermostats to homeowners in Albuquerque and check in on their meters for the next year. But the results would depend on a lot of factors out of the researchers' control, such as how warm or cool individuals like their rooms to be or the houses' insulation quality. And if the experimental system doesn't work, the scientists would have disrupted people's lives and maybe hiked up their utility bills.

But nobody lives in the Center's buildings. Computerized systems will mimic human behavior such as turning thermostats up and down, switching lights off and on, or flushing toilets, but they'll do so under the scientists' control. A research team could install the thermostats in a block of the Center's two-story suburban houses, then run multiple long-term scenarios, manipulating the imaginary residents' behavior to see what the energy use is under different circumstances. "

They're basically saying: 'The real world is too unpredictable, and we want to see if our technology works in a fake world, even though it will be useless in the real world because its so unpredictable.'
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powers

13 years ago

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Couldn't this be done in any # of 3D packages? Maybe not.
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Tori

13 years ago

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On one hand it seems like a waste, building all that. On the other hand, it reminds me of Old West movie ranches, which were created to be a backdrop, not to be actually lived in, and they have had many more years of use than one might think. I wonder if they'll also film in the new empty city?
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