Lanzhou New Area, a New Smart City in Northwest China

Background

Lanzhou New Area (LNA), the first state-level new development area in Northwest China, began its Smart City construction in 2017. With the help of Huawei’s Smart City top-down design and five-year development plan, LNA aims to improve urban resources, city management, and life quality, becoming a pioneer in smart technology and maintaining a sustainable ecosystem.

Challenges

The current challenges faced by LNA include insufficient resources, a fragile environment, and the need for new development methods.

Insufficient resources: As a new urban area in Northwest China, LNA has a weak industrial foundation, insufficient resources, and a limited budget.

Natural environment: The dry soil layer of loess landform in LNA indicates a vulnerable ecosystem. Smart City technology helps decision makers understand complex information and better protect the environment, while still developing economic growth.

New development methods: With limited resources, the traditional method of developing economic growth by infrastructure investment is not suitable for LNA. The area needs to improve the management of its administration, services, and industries in order to grow.

Solutions and Benefits

Smart IT Upgrade: The Largest Data Industrial Park in Northwest China

The LNA Smart City began with the construction of a 3.3 square kilometer industrial park for cloud computing and a Silk Road information hub. Huawei provides an end-to-end big data solution, complete with 21 project contracts, including Huawei cloud computing and a national network data center.

Twenty-five thousand racks were deployed to serve 250,000 cloud computing terminals in 2018. Over 100,000 racks will be deployed to over one billion terminals by 2020, providing efficient, secure, and reliable big data services for the Silk Road information hub.

Smart Healthcare: Resource Scheduling

Data service providers and Huawei joined hands with Zhejiang Helowin Medical Technology Co., Ltd. to design a Smart Healthcare solution for LNA. The system was rolled out in three township health centers and 54 healthcare service centers, covering 70 percent of the population in the area.

LNA has its own healthcare service card, with shared Electronic Health Records (EHR) and bio data in over 50 community health service organizations. Data sharing services allow citizens to have online access to their healthcare information, including consultations, queries, registration, complaints, and evaluations.

In addition, with Huawei’s HD videoconferencing system, LNA has its own remote healthcare and emergency system, which helps identify minor issues that are best served in community health facilities, serious illnesses that require hospital care, and rehabilitation needs that bring healthcare services to family homes.

Smart Environmental Protection: Unified Management and IoT Data Sharing

To strengthen and protect its water sources, such as Shimengou reservoirs, Shanzidun reservoirs, and the number 2 ecological lake, LNA began a series of smart monitoring methods, such as observing the underground water level, checking the water quality on the surface, and video patrol. All of the data is collected and stored, and each water source has its own record.

With the help of Huawei’s Internet of Things (IoT) Solution, rivers are managed by a mechanism that prevents damage from blockage, sewage, dredging, electrofishing, blast fishing, and poison. This unified IoT platform can access and connect thousands of sensors from many different departments, including the following:

62 rain gauge sensors from the Bureau of Ecology and Environment

30,000 water meter sensors from the Water Affairs Bureau

1,100 pipeline sensors from the Civil Service Bureau

4,050 smoke sensors from the Fire Service Department

All of this IoT data is shared and managed in a unified way to protect the LNA environment.

Smart Government: Unified High-Speed Network

Thanks to Huawei’s network planning and design, LNA was able to build the nation’s first government network that integrates both broadband and narrowband communications. It consists of a wired optical network, a wireless command network, and an IoT sensor network, which all help connect an extranet network of 31 departments with 45 eLTE base stations. This creates a high-speed, unified government network for many sectors, including public security, finance, energy, transportation, healthcare, and education.

Smart Services: Innovations

Huawei’s Government Big Data Solution is the foundation of the LNA “Internet + Government Services.” Currently, 594 administrative services are handled via one application, one window, and one network, improving service efficiency by 60 percent. Other advantages include:

Community government service centers and 24-hour self-service machines allow citizens to conduct their business in half the amount of time that it used to take.

An electronic photo database pulls from the following five different business certificates: Business license, institution code, tax registration, social insurance, and statistics registration. This technology improves the enterprise administration efficiency by 100 percent.

Local and national tax collection and management services give enterprise taxpayers the ability to issue electronic invoices through mobile phones, offering a 30 percent savings over the traditional way, in terms of time and money.

These Smart Services have created a good business environment in LNA, attracting more than 500 enterprises.

LNA is recognized as a leader in smart technology. It has received several awards, including Top 10 Special Recommended Destination for 2018 Smart Cities, 2018 China Smart City Innovation Award, and 2017 China Smart City Innovation Award. It also will be showcased at the 4th China Smart City Exhibition, demonstrating a Smart City benchmark at a national level.