Zero to One, Three Stories about Developing Smarter Cities

We need not go back more than 10 years ago to note the introduction of the concept of  the‘Smart City’; however, within that short time the discussion has rapidly evolved into the idea of AI CITY, commonly known as ‘A CITY of Artificial Intelligence'.

According to Deloitte’s report titled ‘Global Smart City 2.0’, there are now more than 2,100 smart city projects currently being developed, worldwide. That said, many may still ask how one goes about developing smart cities and what one looks like. Below, we take a look at three approaches from three of the world’s leading innovators in this field.

Siemens:

Taking grid transformation as a first step to upgrade the infrastructure

As the world's leading enterprise in the electronic engineering sector, Siemens puts the smart grid at the forefront of its smart city solutions, as it serves the crucial purpose of connection to power generators, smart meters, smart transportation and smart buildings, to mention just a few. It focuses on fully unleashing the potential of urban infrastructure and hence satisfying the intensive and ever-growing demand of resources, that is created by the soaring population, being an inevitable result of the process of urbanization.

Smart grid

Siemens' smart grid helps cities capture end-to-end energy flow, both from power generators to users and from users back to power generators alike, therefore making bidirectional power supply possible. Green buildings being taken as an example, not only do they consume electricity, but they are also capable of sending unused, excessive power back to the smart grid system.

Smart meters

Smart meters can measure electricity consumption by specific time-frames, and help cities build electricity tariff models and projections based not only on their load but on particular periods of time as well.

Power generation system

Siemens helps cities transform traditional power plants and integrate renewable energy sources, such as wind and water, to further improve the quality and quantity of their power supply.

Intelligent transportation

As a crucial part of future transportation, electronic vehicles are designed as mobile energy storage devices that can transmit power to the grid when necessary. Simultaneously, Siemens also develops the concept of ‘rail transportation’, offering a cross-system, multimodal traffic control platform for urban transportation planners to create an environmentally friendly intelligent transportation network.

Intelligent buildings

The main idea behind ‘intelligent buildings’ enables urban buildings to automatically control their capacity, energy storage, energy consumption, and so forth, meanwhile creating a comfortable and liveable atmosphere for the dwellers.

Cisco:

Focusing on smart solutions and optimizing the city life

When referring to the concept of ‘the smart city’, Cisco prefers to call it ‘Smart + Connected Communities’. The company specializes in providing optimal solutions and integrated functions to the cities. The company completed many smart community projects worldwide: it helped the city of Copenhagen become more carbon neutral by reducing the emission of greenhouse gases and thus the city became more environmentally-friendly. In Hamburg, Cisco played a leading role in establishing a fully digital network and IT strategy that enabled and integrated the management of both land and marine transportation.

The most recent example of Cisco’s initiatives is Las Vegas, where the company’s objective was to reduce pedestrian mortality in the urban area. It placed sensors at intersections to collect data and therefore designed much more efficient intersections and traffic light systems. At the same time, the company also got involved in working on an automatic shuttle bus system that could accurately measure and predict how many people could potentially be waiting at each bus stop at a particular time of the day and plan the space distribution in the public transport vehicles accordingly. The company also upgraded the curb monitoring system for the purpose of enabling more parking spaces for vehicles based on real-time dataflow, and implemented the tidiness maintenance system of the streets, so that they could be cleaned based on the real demand of the service, instead of a fixed cleaning schedule.

Terminus Group:

Zero to one, creating the epitome of AI CITY

Terminus Group, a global leading AI CITY and smart service provider, uses AIoT technologies to develop an artificial intelligence-based city from ground zero. The city of Chongqing, covering a total floor area of 2,500,000 sqm, can be described as an epitome of future global AI CITY. The aforementioned project of AI CITY summarizes previous efforts and experience of Terminus Group in undertaking more than 8,000 smart projects in 84 cities over the course of the past few years.

The company mostly focuses its efforts on upgrading traditional urban industries and is one among the first to propose and offer the AIOT industry empowerment formula to describe, explain and guide the traditional industries and complete the AIOT LOOP -- a closed loop of intelligent improvements and solutions based on four strategic pillars:

AIOT

AUTOMATION: offline mechanical automation of various lines of hardware devices, such as service robots, industrial robots, automatic controllers, or online operations that can be achieved through intelligently designed solutions and diversified customization;

INTELLECTUALIZATION: with technologies including computer vision and language processing, human decisions can be replaced by smarter decisions based on solutions offered by AI-related technologies;

ONELINE: sharing and connecting all types of data based on increasingly advanced network transmission;

TRANSFORMATION: complete digital transformation through online transactions and devices connected to IoT.

Taking the popular retail industry as an example, Terminus Group helps shopping malls with its digital operation tools for each functional unit of the malls. With Terminus Group’s digital assistance, customers find their shopping experience more enjoyable and satisfying, making it possible for them to enjoy their shopping at their own pace. At the same time, it provides shopping malls with tools that enable them to achieve higher sales targets, higher sales per sqm, higher sales per capita, and higher inventory turnover.

In the field of fire prevention, Terminus Group adopts new technologies to achieve high-level, automated fire prevention and control that helps standardize law enforcement. By integrating GPS, GIS, BIM, and other geo-located information systems, the platform gathers all the data from the firefighting facilities, uploads, and processes them online in real-time. It is also possible for the system to analyze the statistics, conduct more advanced quantitative analyses based upon the data, optimize decision-making processes, and intelligently identify origins of fire and other related hazardous factors using the databases, utilizing advanced mechanisms of data analysis and deep learning.

As a leading enterprise in the AIoT sector, Terminus Group’s products and technology platforms have nearly unlimited potential in the field of widely understood urban solutions, including community management, energy, education, and transportation sectors, health, finance, tourism, water management, real estate industry, and many others.

Relying on its rapidly growing capabilities, Terminus Group’s AI CITY solutions aim to cater to every urban dweller.

Having accumulated years of experience in the industry, Terminus Group has managed to successfully secure its place at the world stage of top-tier solution providers in the field of AI CITY. The company actively cooperates with its business partners in the related sectors to build a holistic ecosystem of smart cities, hoping to create a brand new AI CITY strategy and provide cities with elegant solutions to their complex problems. The solutions offered by the company cover entire urban ecosystems, including the finance sector, environmental protection field, tourism, health-care, technology, and many others, hopefully providing even more in the future to come.