Empowering Campuses With Technology and Intelligence

Imagine you're walking into a meeting room: The lights automatically turn on as you enter, and the air conditioner immediately blows cool air through the room. During your meeting, the management system updates the room's sta-tus to "occupied," ensuring you're not interrupted. After a while, if there's a pat-tern to your meeting schedules, the available meeting room resources for the following day that suit your routine are automatically pushed to you on a mobile app. This isn't a far-fetched idea: it's a reality in Huawei's smart campuses.

With the development of the digital economy and Smart Cities worldwide, a new wave of digital transformation is set to sweep through cities. Smart cam-puses — crucial components of Smart Cities — have become important in ur-ban digital transformation and industry upgrade.

Government campuses — such as industrial parks, government office parks, ports, bonded zones, hospitals, and school campuses — are usually planned and constructed by governments, or by enterprises in cooperation with gov-ernments. Typically designed to meet the production or scientific needs of specific industries, these campuses have complete water pipe networks, elec-tricity grids, communications networks, roads, and other facilities.

Because they have such vast scale and are designed to perform important functions, the intelligent transformation and upgrade of government campuses will facilitate the digital visualization of public resources, improve business pro-cesses, enable intelligent public services, and deliver better services for users and urban residents.

Campus Management Challenges

As these campuses grow — in the number and scale of services they provide, as well as in the physical space they occupy — the scope and depth of cam-pus operation management are expanding, too. For campus managers, tradi-tional systems have several problems when dealing with such changes:

• Siloed subsystems, meaning data can't be interconnected and services can't be converged.

• The campus security situation can't be detected accurately, efficiently, and comprehensively.

• Water and power supply, ventilation, and air conditioning facilities don't have unified management, resulting in poor user experience.

• A lack of efficient energy management measures and low energy efficien-cy.

Because of issues such as these, existing technologies and architectures can no longer keep up: Campus information systems urgently need upgrading.

A New Phase of Campus Governance

Driven by surging service traffic, campus management has entered a new phase. Building a stable and intelligent campus management system isn't an easy task.

Applying decades of experience in intelligent campus management and the government field, Huawei has developed a smart government campus solu-tion. Cloud services and cloud-edge collaboration technologies enable campus digitalization. Huawei also works with partners to deliver all-scenario smart campuses, enable service innovation, improve operation efficiency, and create a simplified experience.

To achieve government campus digitalization, determining which tasks should take priority must be based on campus governance requirements. Smart gov-ernment campus construction usually focuses on typical routine operation management application scenarios, such as security protection, access con-trol, and equipment and facility management.

Smart Security

On a hot summer day, Richard, an on-duty operator at a high-tech industrial park, receives an alarm notification saying there's a burning smell coming from the park's no. 3 building. Once he records the information about the alarm into the system, Richard begins verifying the authenticity of the alarm, before alert-ing an on-duty decision-maker. After receiving information about the alarm, the decision-maker contacts the logistics, general affairs, and administration per-sonnel, and together they go to check on the situation.

This is the usual process for handling security incidents in government cam-puses. The entire process relies on personal experience and lacks scientific support. And with a dearth of data sharing among departments, cross-department linkage is impossible, making the situation even worse.

With Huawei's digital platform and smart campus security applications de-ployed, Richard can immediately initiate the emergency response process as soon as he receives an alarm via the on-duty system and send the alarm to all on-duty decision-makers. When they receive the alarm, on-duty decision-makers can use handheld devices to instruct corresponding departments to respond to the emergency.

On a large screen in the command center, a Geographic Information System (GIS) map based on real-scenario simulation is used to locate the incident. The potential risks, emergency-handling materials, and firefighting equipment in the vicinity are also clearly displayed on the map, and the on-site handling situation can be viewed in real time. With the coordination of the smart security system, the incident can be handled in half an hour.

Routine campus security management requires security personnel to perform security checks at the entrances and exits as well as manual patrols. However, most campuses don't have enough security staff to cover an entire campus. Supported by the smart security system, the campus network implements all-scenario situational monitoring and provides multiple intelligent security solu-tions, such as automatic detection and alarms warning of suspicious personnel crossing walls, as well as automatic identification of issues such as illegal park-ing and materials being put in the wrong places. The solution can improve campuses' security management efficiency and reduce security staff's work-load.

Easy Access Control

Campuses can contain many businesses and organizations. As well as em-ployees of various companies, service providers and visitors may also enter a campus on a daily basis. Monitoring and managing the flow of people and ve-hicles in a campus is a daunting task. Huawei's intelligent access control solu-tion unifies ICT resources to jointly manage multiple authentication methods, such as card swiping, Quick Response (QR) code scanning, and using ID cards. It also supports cloud-based and local authentication, providing a fast-access experience to campus employees.

Meanwhile, visitors and receptionists can apply for access on web pages and apps. Visitors can also use multiple authentication methods — such as card swiping and license plate recognition — to enter without waiting. Visitors' ac-cess area permissions are automatically synchronized to each access control system and perimeter system, implementing an effective authorization pro-cess.

Intelligent Equipment and Facility Management

Routine testing and inspection of key equipment and facilities is an important task in campus operation management. Typically, a medium-sized campus has about 20,000 test points. In the past, one engineer could inspect 50 test points every day. To complete the inspection, 10 engineers need to work con-tinuously for 40 days. Despite the enormous costs of manual inspection, it's still difficult to detect system problems and potential risks comprehensively and efficiently.

With the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, the intelligent equipment and facility management system has shifted from passive fault re-sponse to proactive fault prevention, and from manual fault processing to au-tomated fault detection and assisted processing.

By unifying system interfaces and standardizing data formats, the solution streamlines data channels between subsystems to collect and detect system running status and parameters. GIS-based video linkage helps analyze and quickly locate faulty devices. The Operations and Maintenance (O&M) system manages alarms and faults of devices from different vendors in a unified way and automatically combines and deduplicates alarms and events of the same type, improving O&M efficiency.

The new inspection mode — which relies heavily on intelligent system analysis but also takes manual judgment into consideration — shortens the inspection cycle from 40 days to four hours, making inspection 80 times more efficient while also using proactive prevention to reduce faults.

Digital Campuses Reduce Carbon Emissions

With the world shifting toward low-carbon economies, there's more demand for conservation and environmental protection on campuses. Science and tech-nology should play a critical role in reducing carbon emissions. Huawei's pro-vides energy-saving ICT infrastructure and helps construct energy-saving buildings to assist government campuses in achieving low-carbon goals.

To help build zero-carbon data centers and networks, Huawei offers efficient and intelligent green ICT infrastructures. Huawei also collaborates with indus-try partners to build low-carbon campuses. Huawei's modular data center sup-ports simple and efficient one-stop deployment of the entire cabinet. The intel-ligent cooling solution of the Data Center (DC) implements dynamic cooling policies, reducing energy consumption by 8–15%. By better integrating chips and components, Huawei's optical transport products can reduce power con-sumption by up to 45% compared with traditional devices. Wireless access de-vices use leading engineering design and algorithms, as well as advanced hardware materials and heat dissipation technologies to reduce power con-sumption by 15%.

Constructing energy-efficient buildings is another effective means to reduce carbon emissions. Huawei's smart campus solution uses multiple systems — such as real-time power consumption monitoring, historical power consumption analysis, and power demand prediction — to intelligently adjust the running status of devices and buildings. The solution has been successfully applied in Huawei's own campuses. And by deploying the smart campus solution, Huawei is able to operate and manage all its campuses in a unified manner. In 2020 alone, the solution has helped Huawei's campuses in China save 200 million kWh of electricity and reduce Operating Expenditure (OPEX) by ap-proximately CNY140 million (about US$21.6 million).

Building a Prosperous Ecosystem for Smart Campuses

The government smart campus industry involves security, energy, weak cur-rent systems, and operations, as well as vendors from various fields, such as terminals, networks, platforms, and applications. Governments, enterprises, industry organizations, and other industry chain participants must work togeth-er to support the healthy and sustainable development of the industry.

The smart campus ecosystem that Huawei has pioneered is a cooperative network in which all parties work closely with each other, depend on each oth-er, and grow together. Adhering to its 'platform + ecosystem' strategy, Huawei is committed to building open, easy-to-use, and secure platforms; establishing mutually beneficial relationships with partners; and helping customers use digi-tal platforms.

In the smart campus domain, Huawei has developed 10 types of partners, in-cluding consulting and planning, system integration, and application develop-ment partners. It also devises tailored ecosystem plans for different partners, and issues smart campus partner certificates to those with interconnection testing and training certification.

Huawei now has more than 300 campus partners, and nearly 1000 develop-ment and service engineers worldwide have obtained Huawei's development expert certification and service expert certification. Moving forward, Huawei will attract more partners — aiming to build an open ecosystem and create greater value for campus customers.