Ruicheng Technology: How to Achieve Smarter Urban Management Using a Digital Brain

What Is an Urban Digital Brain?

A digital brain acts as the ‘central nervous system’ of a Smart City, and supports decision-making, command and dispatch, and data analysis. A city’s big data is gathered from government and social data. Cross-domain data convergence and analysis enable the detection and prediction of the operating status of the city. It displays the city status in real time, provides information for emergency command, and serves as a command center for major emergencies. This is a new and innovative model for Smart City management that consolidates routine and emergency management into one system.

• One Unified Map for Global Information: City Status Detection

The digital brain accesses heterogeneous data from a multitude of sources — such as government, Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet, and carrier networks — which is then integrated, governed, analyzed, and mined to generate urban big data that reflects the city’s operating status. Using holographic big data visualization technology, a digital twin of the physical city is rendered — showing the status above ground, underground, in the air, and in the sea on one unified map — covering all service domains, such as the economy, security, transportation, ecology, public welfare, and government services.

• One-Click Decision-Making Support for Management: Strategy Development

Built in the Intelligent Operation Center (IOC), the digital brain enables comprehensive decision-making analysis by integrating data and services across departments. For instance, the regional industry planning function analyzes which industries are suitable for deployment and creates supportive policies after systematically integrating a range of pertinent data in the target and surrounding areas including: upstream and downstream industry chain, carriers, talent, and infrastructure (e.g. transportation, schools, hospitals, and housing). With this data, cities can apply facts to the decision-making process.

• Integrated, Collaborative Dispatch and Command: City Hub

The digital brain sets up an integrated command center that covers all data, systems, and networks, enabling cross-department and cross-level command. In case of major events or emergencies, the digital brain supports information acquisition, expert consultation, solution development, emergency resource dispatch, and information transfer. With joint dispatching and integrated command of multiple departments, rescue efficiency is improved, and injuries and property losses are reduced.

• One Screen for Intelligent Operations Command Anywhere: Cockpit for Leaders

The digital brain features a cockpit app designed for city managers that is tailored to their individual responsibilities. With this app, managers can check the city’s operating status anytime and anywhere, and make decisions or issue commands to resolve problems in a timely manner, strengthening the city’s management and improving incident response efficiency.

How to Understand a Smart City

A Smart City cannot be built overnight. Rather, a Smart City is the product of the countless interactions and evolutions of new technologies, services, processes, mechanisms, organizations, and ideas. The history of human civilization is also the history of city evolution, with energy and information playing a key role in shaping its destiny. For millenniums, human beings have been improving the efficiency of energy and information use, going from hunting and gathering to farming to industrialization, automation, informatization, and digitalization. In Smart City projects, Ruicheng is on a mission to make data easy to understand and to enrich human-machine interactions by adding emotional intelligence to Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Ideally, people should feel comfortable with data, enabling humans to progress alongside machines.

City development issues cannot be resolved by technology alone; they require a process of continuous improvement that is aided by technology. As for the design of the digital brain, Ruicheng’s approach is to strive to understand services and people and match them with suitable products and technologies. Continuous learning is key, and Ruicheng strives to understand industries even better than industry insiders. In addition, by capitalizing on Ruicheng’s technical strength in big data visualization, customers can get an intuitive understanding of the data and grasp service development trends through visualization. Once managers truly understand the data, they can anticipate issues, risks, and trends to make fact-based decisions.

The digital brain is an innovative solution in the industry. Therefore, it is critical to collaborate with outstanding partners to build the city’s digital brain. The digital brain used in Smart Cities is more than visualization software; it must also be able to change and understand service processes, with support for the collection, governance, analysis, and mining of big data.

How to Build a Digital Brain

Within two years, Ruicheng, together with Huawei, has provided digital brain solutions and products to more than 30 cities worldwide, giving strong support for effective and efficient governance in these cities.

• Beijing Yanqing District: City Service Management Platform Safeguards International Horticultural Exhibition

Yanqing District’s city service management platform is oriented toward transportation and tourists — and follows the ‘1 + 9 + X + Y’ principle. That is, based on Yanqing’s informatization construction status, the district has constructed one city service management platform; integrated nine industry systems (e.g. smart transportation and smart tourism); aggregated data of X key domains; and accessed Y types of urban and social data. In this way, informatization projects are accessed and managed centrally, systems are integrated across departments and services, and data is interconnected more efficiently. Based on the district-level big data platform, the center provides functions such as situation awareness, decision-making analysis, and collaborative command, supporting the stable operation of Yanqing.

Yanqing hosted the International Horticultural Exhibition in 2019 with visitors from all over the world. This major event places enormous strain on urban management. To ensure smooth operations, Yanqing improved its management system for pedestrians and vehicles within the jurisdiction, and enhanced comprehensive management capabilities and services.

The Yanqing project employs Ruicheng’s big data visualization and Huawei’s converged communications technology to enable collaborative command and incident management between junior grid administrators and the command center, accelerating incident processing in the city.

• Big Data in Guizhou Province: ‘One Cloud, One Network, and One Platform’ Improve Government Service Capabilities

As China’s first comprehensive big data pilot area, Guizhou has introduced pilot initiatives such as data sharing and innovative big data applications. The province has also proposed a goal to create ‘One Cloud, One Network, and One Platform.’

‘One Cloud’ refers to one Guizhou cloud that collects all government data across the province. The On-Cloud Guizhou System stores, shares, and develops data centrally, allowing data to easily move from the cloud to government, civilian, and commercial applications. To date, the cloud has supported 9,730 application systems from provincial, municipal, and county-level departments, and stored 1,610 TB of data.

‘One Network’ refers to one network for government services. It integrates service systems from governments at all levels to facilitate data sharing, unifying government services on one network. The one-network service window is open to both enterprises and residents — enhancing online public service capabilities and improving application processing efficiency. Guizhou’s eGovernment service network consists of two parts: physical and logical networks. In terms of physical network construction, the eGovernment network covers four levels: province, city, county, and town, and will extend to villages by the end of 2019. As for logical network construction, government service centers at provincial, municipal, county, town, and village levels can query and process 588,000 government service items on PCs; the On-Cloud Guizhou app offers over 430 common government services to the public.

‘One Platform’ refers to one intelligent work platform that covers government services and data governance. For government services, data sharing has enabled parallel processing of administrative approvals, replacing the outdated sequential method. For data governance, data resources from all departments are integrated into one, with over 12,000 data directories and 200,000 information items added on the platform already. The integrated platform schedules data across layers, regions, and departments in the province, maximizing the value of data through utility and sharing.

Guizhou’s ‘One Cloud, One Network, and One Platform’ project is created based on data governance, implementing government data aggregation, convergence, and application. This project aims to provide convenient and fast services to enterprises and the public by eliminating information and data silos. Incorporating big data technologies into social governance, public welfare services, real economy, and rural revitalization would further enhance the government’s capabilities.

With so much at stake, Guizhou has very high standards for the vendor’s multi-system and big data capabilities. To fulfill the project’s requirements, Huawei helped Guizhou easily integrate and converge multi-source data through Huawei Horizon Digital Platform. Meanwhile, Ruicheng enabled Guizhou to integrate, analyze, and use 9,730 application systems and 1,610 TB of data by leveraging the big data visualization platform.