SmartLaundry: A Real-Time System for Public Laundry Allocation in Smart Cities

Sensors (Basel). 2024 Mar 28;24(7):2159. doi: 10.3390/s24072159.

Abstract

Smart cities facilitate the comprehensive management and operation of urban data generated within a city, establishing the foundation for smart services and addressing diverse urban challenges. A smart system for public laundry management uses artificial intelligence-based solutions to solve the challenges of the inefficient utilization of public laundries, waiting times, overbooking or underutilization of machines, balancing of loads across machines, and implementation of energy-saving features. We propose SmartLaundry, a real-time system design for public laundry smart recommendations to better manage the loads across connected machines. Our system integrates the current status of the connected devices and data-driven forecasted usage to offer the end user connected via a mobile application a list of recommended machines that could be used. We forecast the daily usage of devices using traditional machine learning techniques and deep learning approaches, and we perform a comparative analysis of the results. As a proof of concept, we create a simulation of the interaction with our system.

Keywords: IoT; forecasting usage; public laundries’ allocation; real-time system; recommendation algorithm; smart city.

Grants and funding

This research received no external funding.