Innovative Evolution of Smart City IOCs

Qiao Shi

Smart City Operation Manager, Huawei Digitization and Technical Service Dept., Enterprise Business Group

Today, intelligentization is a recurring topic during discussions of technological development. Almost everything — from a humble street lamp to an entire city — is now seemingly empowered with intelligence.

However, Smart City managers often emphasize construction over operations. And this leads to avoidable mishaps and complications later on in the process of sustainable city development. To address this issue, city managers need to shift the focus onto long-term operations, to transform the established city management system into one that is more efficient and productive.

New Smart Cities need an Intelligent Operation Center (IOC) at their core, functioning as the city’s brain and playing an active role in the top layer of the city's development architecture. An IOC also needs to connect the city's management, service, and command centers. Indeed, the initial development of an operation center determines not only a city's intelligentization journey, but also whether the journey will be a smooth or bumpy ride.

Clearly, a Smart City needs strong and reliable operations support capabilities to ensure sustainable development. Operations support — in terms of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) assets, industry data, and services — is integrated with scenario-specific applications to augment city operations and management. Such strengthened operations support has the capacity to advance service improvement requirements, thereby forming a healthy cycle, helping governments and enterprises make quicker and better decisions.

Services and Technologies Drive Industry Development

City IOCs directly integrate the existing work achievements of each department on a unified big data platform, where users can see a visual representation of their combined efforts easily on-screen. With the power of such a platform, city IOCs are a dedicated vessel for centralized development, joint contribution, and other shared benefits. Through physical technologies and services around the city, an IOC can gather data from a range of sectors such as the economy, public services, transportation, and the environment. This paves the way for big data analytics and situational awareness, giving city managers essential data-driven support for decision making.

In an IOC system, the economic operation module displays all commercial entities on one map. It provides market management departments with precise market supervision capabilities, who are now ready to spot and deal with any regulatory violations at pace. Meanwhile, the public service module dynamically tracks the provision of eGovernment services, and promptly resolves any issues that arise during the process. The transportation module is aligned with traffic indexes, and manages the real-time traffic status and location data of all kinds of vehicles. Elsewhere, the ecological environment module comprehensively evaluates environment improvement projects, pollution, law enforcement, and citizen complaints. For the most part, its assessment is based on air and water quality, as well as other environmental indicators. The public safety module helps improve the medical assistance system, including general healthcare and medical insurance. Finally, the culture and entertainment module shows the development status of cultural, sports and tourism industries, in order to assess them and see how they can be helped to grow.

All such management data and information are shown on screens of various types and sizes, including large Light Emitting Diode (LED) display boards, personal computers, TVs, and mobile devices, meaning that decision-making is supported anytime and anywhere. This significantly enhances IOC capabilities in indicator-based city management, improving convenience and efficiency overall.

Advancing the Sustainable Development of Smart Cities

The development of Smart Cities requires long-term investment. During the whole process, the city IOC acts as an essential, comprehensive infrastructure for digital government, functioning as the brain of the Smart City, simply put. With this in mind, Huawei proactively seeks operations support service solutions for city IOCs and has developed a set of unified operations support tools.

The operations planning and design service helps customers set operations targets, build an optimal operations system, and plan for future operations organizations and services. In addition, the industry data operations service allows customers to understand both the overall IOC data and city operations status, presented in a clear and concise format. Lastly, the scenario-specific service provides extra help with the management of emergencies, major events, and key meetings. With the support of all of these services, customers can make full use of city IOCs, getting the most out of their capabilities and helping to achieve sustainable success.

On the way to intelligence, a city requires not just an established management system, but an efficient one. Huawei is actively exploring the development trends and direction of city IOCs to accelerate the informatization of cities. Moreover, Huawei will contribute a wide range of intelligent ICT technologies to bolster the development of Smart Cities, ushering in the intelligent future together.