Businesses today are progressively embracing and leveraging smart technologies to transform their business models and stay competitive in the marketplace. Conversely, city leaders are also thinking about to embrace those smart technologies in innovative ways to reshape public services.
Currently, cities are shifting beyond the pilot stage and utilizing data and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, big data, etc., to deliver outcomes that are more germane and meaningful to residents. As cities are getting smarter, they are becoming more livable and responsive. In this context, smartphones playing a key role in the cities, putting abrupt information about transit, health services, traffic, safety alerts, and community news to millions of hands.
So, let's dive more into depth how leaders started putting their minds towards designing the cities at large.
Smart cities put data and digital technology to work to make superior decisions and advance the quality of life the people live. More comprehensive, real-time data provides agencies the ability to monitor events as they unfold, comprehend how demand patterns are changing, and respond with faster, lower and cost-effective solutions.
By using data and artificial intelligence in innovative ways, these 8 cities are reshaping public services.
Remarked as the 28th-most populated city in the United States, operating 24-hours a day, Las Vegas is home to almost 650,000 dwellers. Hosting 43 million tourists each year, with its bustling casinos, the city officials recently turned to smart city data management to mitigate the pressure.
The city leveraged Hitachi's Smart Spaces and Video Intelligence solution, an amalgamation of hardware and software that utilizes intelligent video and other IoT (Internet of Things) data. The city uses this solution to provide a single view of activity, operations, and safety issues with intelligence for real-time data and analysis, implementing resources more effectively.
Understand the city's trend with an instance. If a pothole in the city is likely to develop in a given location, the city can generate heat maps of streets that can indicate and take steps to fix the issue before it starts to mutilate vehicles.
With a vast metropolis where modern skyscrapers, high-tech subways, and pop culture meet Buddhist temples, palaces, and street markets, Seoul is the capital of South Korea. In the city, waste management has become an area of interest and in today's digital age, big data and IoT has become part of the solution that can ease the issues efficiently.
To do so, a smart waste management solutions maker Ecube Labs came into the city when the first smart city projects started to emerge in Korea. The company focuses on four main products – solar-powered waste bins which compact waste, fill-level sensors monitoring the quantity of waste in each bin, a big data platform collecting the information from the bins and a platform that automatically refines manual collection routes based on machine learning algorithms. These solutions bring massive cost-savings and a cleaner city.
The company's products have now been installed in more than 150 locations in Seoul, from parks to department stores, leisure venues and tourist districts, according to Guillaume Weill, project director at Intralink.
Known for its artistic heritage, networks of canals and narrow houses with gabled facades, Amsterdam is the Capital of the Netherlands. Place of around 1,800 bridges in total that is far more than any other city in the world, the city has the world' s first 3D-printed steel bridge. Named as the MX3D bridge, it uses industrial six-axis robots, proprietary software and welding machines that deposit stainless steel from thin, molten wire to develop the 40-foot-long smart pedestrian bridge spanning the Oudezijds Achterburgwal, one of the oldest canals in Amsterdam.
Designed by Joris Laarman Lab in collaboration with Arup and supported by Autodesk and other partners, the MX3D bridge is equipped with sensors. The bridge streams data to the cloud where it is then processed and read to visualize intelligence about bridge traffic, structural integrity, and the surrounding neighborhood and ecosystem.
The bridge can even send alerts when it requires maintenance and talks to roadways to time the lights better to lessen congestion at busy times.
With 883,305 residents, San Francisco is home to a little bit of everything. Currently, the city's municipal transportation agency, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), is focusing on the strategic goals to prioritize transport that doesn't comprise a car. The strategic goal is part of its vision for a sustainable transportation system that includes a safe network of bicycle-friendly streets where people of all ages and ability can feel confident traveling on two wheels.
To drive this effort, the SFMTA utilizes automated counters to monitor key bicycle data, which it evaluates annually to get an idea of cycle use in the city. By using the information from these smart monitors, the agency added 10 miles to the bikeway network and developed 30 new intersections. 5.5 miles of that new bikeway network received physical protection from passing traffic.
Enriched with modern and Shakespearean plays theatres experiences, Stratford city is placed on the Avon River in southwest Ontario, Canada. Today's population and transportation boom almost affected all the cities globally that requires a global smart solution.
Parking in cities is often annoying and time-consuming, but smart city data management can ease this annoyance and can become a much simpler affair. So, without delaying and seeing the opportunity, the City of Stratford has invested in smart technology so visitors can spend less time to search for space and spend more time in local businesses.
To propel this effort, the city has installed 78 IoT sensors that integrate information with GPS data and transmit whether a parking spot is free or vacant, with providing every half an hour updates to an Amazon Web Services MQTT Broker that relays the update to the Information Builders WebFOCUS data analytics platform.
The city also leverages open data to provide parking sensor information to local entrepreneurs and developers, so they can create apps like directions from the users' car to their restaurant, with discounts to incentivize visitors.
Today, the increase in global energy supplies lead to certain types of environmental impact. It's unsurprising then that energy utilization is a huge consideration when it comes to smart cities using big data.
To create a smart energy supply solution Frederiksberg Forsyning, a publicly owned utility company in Copenhagen designed with the aim of optimizing their supply network and create efficiency savings. But one of the issues with doing this is the reliability of data, with utility companies often reliant on customers for monthly or yearly meter readings.
To address this, the company created a connectivity network across the municipality and then installed sensors in their pipelines to gauge usage from the point of production to the substation and on to the end-customer. By doing so, they went from getting infrequent customer readings to 700 data points a second, seeing savings on water loss and energy use.
City in the Netherlands, The Hague is attracting tourists with its numerous tourist destinations. The city's municipality office was keen to explore lighting options for the area, not simply using aesthetically pleasing street lights, but dynamic ones that could be used to improve energy performance and be remotely controlled in real time.
To overcome this challenge, the leading provider of classic streetlight DE NOOD, in partnership with intelligent lighting company Tvilight, have installed lighting that respects the look and feel of the area. They utilize cutting-edge smart city data management and technology to offer better control. Improving the lighting systems in the city, the integrated motion sensors empower the lamps to adjust their brightness automatically based on real-time human presence.
Brussels relies on 4 train lines, 17 tram lines and 50 bus lines that serve its residents where they need to go. The company that runs these services, named STIB–MIVB, tracks 401 million journeys a year and 1,200 vehicles. To lever the stream of big data, the company teamed up with SAP and Cubis to access the analytics required to advance customer service and operate the system more efficiently.
With improving the commuters' and visitors' experience, the collaboration has enabled more proactive vehicle maintenance, greater transparency when it comes to using of public funds, the ability to cater for passengers with disabilities and lessened environmental impact.
Brian Duffy, SAP's Europe, Middle East, and Africa north regional president says, "Cities are full of data that can help us better understand travel times, routes and crunch points on a network. If used in the right way, data insights can help people get to where they are going faster, more efficiently and more reliably."
In summary, taking steps into digital space can benefit the cities globally and support the cities leaders to perform innovative ways en route to making their cities smarter. Smart-city technologies assist cities to get more out of their assets, whether they have wide-ranging legacy systems. Smart cities transform the economics of infrastructure and build a room for partnerships and private-sector participation.
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