One important way city managers are responding to these challenges is through the development of Smart Cities. These cities will be dynamic and constantly evolve to keep pace with citizen expectations for high quality services and efficient systems while ensuring sustainability for the future.
Like a living organism, a Smart City has a nervous system that comprises a ‘brain’ [the control center] and ‘peripheral nerves’ [the network and sensors] gathering real-time information about the health and status of the city, its environment and infrastructure. For example, sensors can provide data on the transportation system performance enabling the brain to manage congestion, smooth demand and safely reduce delays for citizens.
Leading global ICT company, Huawei has helped urban authorities across the world to create digitally-connected ecosystems that have transformed the way cities function – improving connectivity between people and things to generate innovation, economic growth and social progress. Through leading new ICT, Huawei provides the nervous system to deliver early warnings to potential city issues and drive unified coordination, cross-sector collaboration, and intelligent analysis for effective management of city services. In fact, Huawei’s Smart City solutions have been deployed in more than 120 cities across 40 countries.
Leading New ICT enables a Smart City’s Nervous System
As cities aspire to become Smart Cities, authorities are being challenged to create an effective operational system and environment in which the complex nervous system works seamlessly to constantly learn and enhance the city’s services.
Thankfully, Huawei is helping cities begin their transformative process into Smart Cities by delivering leading new ICT that enables a high-tech nervous system including an Intelligent Operations Center (IOC) as the brain connecting the digital and physical worlds.
More specifically, Huawei provides wired and wireless broadband networks that enable ubiquitous broadband coverage supporting high-speed data, video, and voice services. Huawei also delivers an Internet of Things (IoT) platform comprising LiteOS, a secure, lightweight and intelligent OS, and Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), a standards-based low power wide area (LPWA) technology developed to enable a wide range of new IoT devices and services.
Like the human nervous system, the IoT platform uses smart sensing to collect and consolidate information from across the city and connects to Huawei’s IOC that integrates, processes and analyzes vast amounts of disparate data in real-time so appropriate action can be taken.
The underlying infrastructure of the IOC comprises distributed cloud data centers and ubiquitous city networks that collect, integrate and share city information, enabling real-time visibility of the city. The IOC uses an Integrated Communications Platform (ICP) that enables intelligent collaboration across city functions and emergency dispatch of all services. By using Big Data, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, the IOC delivers valuable insights to facilitate city management and help city managers respond quickly to fast-changing city events.
Building Saudi Arabia’s First Smart City
As urban authorities face increasing pressure to build Smart Cities that place citizens at the center, they are adopting Huawei’s Smart City solutions to help identify citizens’ needs and create services that enhance their lives.
One notable example can be seen in Yanbu, a major industrial port city on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast, where Huawei is helping the Royal Commission of Yanbu build Saudi Arabia’s first Smart City which will lead the way for Saudi Arabia’s country-wide Smart City transformation.
Huawei used an optic fiber network covering the city’s residential housing, enterprises and key public areas, and deployed smart applications including smart parking, smart heavy vehicle weighing, smart bins, smart energy management, smart streetlights, venue crowd analytics, and smart manhole covers. These applications have improved the efficiency of utility management and enhanced public safety and livability. It uses smart technology monitoring to replace human patrolling, improving city management efficiency by 70%. Using smart street lamps and smart meters enables real-time power consumption adjustment for public lighting, improving general power consumption by 20%. Huawei is also working with RC Yanbu to develop a city management platform to further improve municipal governance.
Driving Smart Tourism in Dunhuang
Building a Smart City can not only benefit citizens but also the economy as a whole. Take Dunhuang, as an example. As one of the ancient world’s most important intersections between East and West, Dunhuang is a popular city to visit on the Silk Road. In Dunhuang’s desert areas, Smart Tourism has been developed to improve the quality of services in peak seasons and attract more tourists in off-peak seasons, while promoting city governance and sustainable economic growth.
To achieve this, Huawei helped Dunhuang Smart Tourism Company (DSTC) build a central cloud center linking the service systems of government departments to provide shared information that enables a quick and efficient response to city governance issues, public security, transportation, and city management emergencies. The project involved the development of a tourist traffic model for desert areas through IoT to improve city management, Silk Road tourism service quality and smart public services.
DSTC was a ‘city award’ finalist for the World Smart City Awards at the 2016 Smart City Expo World Congress, highlighting its significant achievements in driving economic growth and enhancing people’s lives through pioneering systems and services. It has received 8 million domestic and overseas visitors every year, scenic spot visitors bearing capabilities increased by 40%, and visitors idle time was reduced by 20%.
Huawei’s Ecosystem and Platform Underpins the Delivery of Future Smart Cities
Smart city development is emerging as a major solution to tackle challenges relating to rapid urbanization in cities across the world. With 13 OpenLabs around the globe, Huawei and its partners conduct joint research to build sustainable ecosystems and offer localized Smart City solutions. Through leading new ICT infrastructure, together with collaboration among its ecosystem of public and private sector partners, Huawei provides a Smart City nervous system that creates an intelligent and interconnected society to improve citizens’ quality of life.
To date, 197 companies on the Fortune Global 500 list and 45 of the top 100 enterprises have chosen Huawei as their partner for digital transformation.
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