Hebi and Huawei Build a New City Sensing System to Make the City Smarter

The City of Hebi in China's Henan Province is making steady progress in intelligent, digital, and refined management through its rollout of smart pole sites. These sites form a city sensing network system that makes use of existing urban lamp poles, on which it attaches various poles from urban management, transportation, emergency response, meteorology, and other departments. This provides citizens with a range of services such as one-click assistance, public address systems, urban flood warnings, and parking guidance.

Hebi has achieved significant progress in the development of its city sensing network system, thanks to the smart pole sites' three key features: full-area coverage, full-element sensing, and full-scenario intelligence. This allows fewer poles to meet the different needs of the city and also enhances the city's ability in management, intelligent sensing, and public services.

The smart pole sites are only one part of Hebi's smart city development. In partnership with Huawei, Hebi has become a demonstration city for the IoT city sensing network system. This system dynamically collects real-time sensing data and uses a 3D model of the city to standardize data acquired through sensing terminals. With AI-based sensing of urban events, Hebi now has a comprehensive sensing system that covers the entire city, creating a fully connected and digitally advanced city backed by city intelligent twins.

Hebi has developed a variety of applications for urban transportation, safety, governance, and services, creating a city that is sensing, intelligent, connected, and cloud-based. This has culminated in Hebi's position as a national, or even global, model for smart cities, providing a blueprint for further development and promoting digital transformation in cities.

A Strong Data Foundation Is Essential As Smart Cities Develop at a Faster Pace

Cities play a vital role in driving the digital development of China, supporting economic growth, social governance, and public services. Advancing the smart and digital transformation in cities is essential for enhancing competitiveness and modernizing urban governance systems and capabilities.

As China continues to build a digital society, its smart cities are undergoing a full-scale digital transformation. That said, the lack of real-time, accurate, and consistent data remains a major obstacle in the way of the digital and intelligent development of cities. This leads to low efficiency in urban governance, frequent safety incidents, and poor urban service experiences.

To fully utilize data as a fundamental resource and innovation engine, efforts to promote the development of smart cities are ongoing. In early 2024, the National Data Administration and 16 other departments released the Three-Year Action Plan for Data Elements X (2024–2026). The plan aims to optimize urban management, integrate multidimensional data such as people, places, events, things, public opinions, and organizations, and support various scenarios in fields including public health, traffic management, environment, and grassroot-level governance.

Hebi is one of the first national-level smart city pilot cities and one at the provincial-level. In recent years, Hebi has focused on advancing data-driven, service-oriented systems and intelligent applications. It plans to build people-friendly city intelligent twins that can sense, learn, and evolve. Hebi has made consistent efforts to improve its IoT city sensing system so as to enable data-informed urban governance as well as timely discovery, rapid disposal, and effective closed-loop management of urban issues. The system gathers masses of reliable city data, breaks down data silos, and lays a solid data foundation for the city.

To achieve this, Hebi partnered with Huawei to create a network infrastructure and data center for Hebi's IoT sensing system. They tackled Hebi's urban transportation and safety issues by developing smart solutions like intelligent road networks, fire route smoothness assurance, and parking and driving guidance. The Intelligent Operation Center (IOC) centrally displays the city's sensing system, safety, transportation, governance, and service situations, contributing to city services and operations that are safer, more diverse, responsive, precise, and efficient.

Creating a Smart City Core Framework, Promoting All-Scenario Intelligence

Huawei and Hebi have joined forces to create a core framework for intelligent cities with a "1+1+2+N" architecture. This framework focuses on comprehensive sensing and makes use of innovative hardware and software products. It offers robust support for advancing the city's digital transformation and implementing intelligent solutions in all settings as the development of new smart cities ramps up.

Hebi started off by building one innovative cloud base that integrates resources from data centers and personnel of various departments. By harnessing cloud computing and AI, Hebi now offers cloud services such as cloud-based servers, storage, security, backup, and O&M to all levels of government departments in the city. This supports Hebi's smart city development and innovation, as well as service applications that benefit individuals and enterprises. It also provides data, computing power, and algorithm support for achieving all-scenario intelligence in Hebi's smart city.

On top of the innovative cloud base, Hebi has developed one city digital platform as the central hub for constructing a demonstration city for the IoT sensing system. This platform serves as a hub for data, intelligence, connectivity, and operations. And to ensure reliable data, Hebi is also improving functions such as data aggregation, governance, mining, analysis, sharing, and management. The data hub includes big data, IoT sensing, and video sensing platforms, while the operation hub provides Hebi with comprehensive resource operation capabilities through a unified sensing resource operations system.

With the support of the innovative cloud base and city digital platform, Hebi has established two centers: the city sensing operation center and joint innovation center. The operation center accesses data from various departments' service systems to achieve multi-dimensional, visualized, and dynamic operation observation and early warning of the city's operation situation. In turn, it provides support for linked command and dispatch, and also assists decision-making to promote integrated city operation. The joint innovation center gradually shapes an industry landscape that features synergistic software and hardware development through platform construction and operation, benchmarking, talent cultivation, and industrial agglomeration.

To incorporate cutting-edge technologies like big data, cloud computing, and AI into urban governance and daily life, Hebi has created a number of smart applications through its digital platform. These include applications for urban transportation, governance, safety, and services, allowing people to enjoy the benefits of living in a smart city.

Invigorating the City and Accelerating Its Comprehensive Digital Transformation

Hebi has made full use of the latest technological revolution and industrial transformation by collaborating with Huawei to establish a demonstration city for the IoT sensing system. This has yielded remarkable outcomes in the development of the smart city, with the creation of various exemplary applications in smart pole sites, transportation, and new urban infrastructure. These initiatives have further fueled the city's innovation and vitality.

For transportation, Hebi has developed a comprehensive system that uses an intelligent road network to calculate real-time traffic paths and determine traffic conditions at intersections and road sections. This allows for the prediction of traffic flow changes during different periods and the implementation of intelligent traffic signal control. Road sections featuring green wave traffic have been established, allowing signal control to be flexibly implemented based on the flow of vehicles. This has greatly improved the efficiency of citizens' travel and the precision of traffic management in the city.

To improve safety and security, Hebi has deployed a range of intelligent devices and IoT sensors. They analyze video, IoT data, and events using recognition algorithms to achieve uninterrupted safety awareness and automatic risk analysis. Moreover, demonstrations are conducted in critical areas such as city infrastructure, fire exits, and major events to establish a closed-loop process of quickly detecting, distributing, and disposing of problems, while also effectively tracking and supervising their resolution. This enhances Hebi's overall intelligent city safety management.

In terms of urban governance, Hebi uses Pangu models to offer algorithm training, generalization discovery, semantic interaction, and various office assistants to government departments and businesses. This can unlock the value of data elements and improve social governance, public services, and enterprise productivity.

When it comes to urban development, Hebi city has adopted an open-source operating system for its sensing devices, which also allows for further innovation on terminals. In addition, Hebi is encouraging local enterprises to engage in building an industry ecosystem and constantly acquire the best solutions, technologies, and talent to boost their competitiveness and advance digital industry growth.

Huawei, a key partner of Hebi, will use its extensive experience in serving numerous smart city projects worldwide to support Hebi's smart city development. Huawei will leverage its technological strengths in fundamental technology, digital platforms, and Pangu models to strengthen cooperation with Hebi and help create city intelligent twins. Together, they will establish a demonstration city for the IoT sensing system with Hebi's own standards.

Hebi has set an example for the transformation of old industrial and resource-intensive cities by actively adapting to and leading the new technological and industrial revolution. With a focus on becoming a high-quality development demonstration city in the new era, Hebi has made consistent efforts from establishing an IoT sensing system to building a new smart city. This will promote the deep integration of technological and industrial innovation, accelerate the digital transformation, and foster new productive forces for the whole city.