Lisbon Spends 1.2 Million Euros On A Smart City Platform

If there's an emergency in Lisbon, you'll likely see it pop up here on its intelligent management platform. This is a smart city hub that Lisbon has been using since 2017 to better monitor its city services. The platform provided by the Japanese IT company NEC is synced with data that comes from sensors, IoT systems, and video cameras installed the city. Lisbon paid 1 .2 million euros for this platform with the goal that it will enable the city to monitor everything from traffic and transportation to waste management and as we're seeing here, public safety. We are in the brand new police control room. They are creating occurrences, registering the occurrences in the city platform. And this is just the beginning. Lisbon is now in the midst of building an integrated operational center. This is a central hub where employees from various city departments can work together and respond to emergencies using the intelligent management platform as their guide. It's estimated to cost around 3 million euros. It was difficult to share information, for example, between the police and the fire department and the protection services. Now, Lisbon says there have been clear improvements... in city operations as a result of the intelligent management platform. For example, traffic congestion has reportedly been reduced thanks to improved management of its bike-sharing program. The Mobility Department now has the data to know how many bikes are in a parking station, whether it's full or empty, and how many bikes are even being used at any given time. They're picking up the garbage and then you have waste management. The city has installed 2 ,000 sensors inside its waste bins. The sensors are supposed to city officials when the bins are full. Well, it's not a good example. But as you can see, not all of them worked as planned. A LoRaWAN network, which will boost communication among the IoT devices, is expected to help with this problem. The sensors also have the ability to notify the city when the bins are rising in temperature. For instance, if the temperature is above 60 degrees Celsius, the platform will trigger an alarm. The city also relies upon video surveillance cameras to enhance its public safety efforts. Sometimes it's more useful to have analytics in the cameras, in the edge. So all these cameras will have analytics and these cameras will create alarms to the platform and the police can see the alarms and take decisions if it's not something important or they need to create occurrences in the platform. Plus, the city can get a better view into the energy consumption. of some of its largest companies and affordable housing units. For instance, for large energy consumers or for large water consumers, we contact them and ask for their permission to get the data in the system. And we ask them, do you use more potable water? Do you use water that can be recycled water? And then when we knew this, we could plan the infrastructure to target these high consumption. places whenever they can use non-potable water. All this is managed on-premises. We need to have the security that our data are available. So we have this data in our data center. Now, if Lisbon continues to install sensors and cameras throughout its borders, it also brings to light its philosophy when it comes to the management of this infrastructure. Lisbon buys it all as a service and therefore throws the responsibility of the performance It's very difficult for the cities to do this kind of management of technological things that are not in the experience of the city. Looking ahead, Lisbon expects its integrated operational center to be up and running sometime in 2021. And the biggest challenge in the meantime is public perception. We need to change internally and to try to... respond the needs of the citizen the all the citizens and not only the citizens that are gadget driven now a new app aims to help with that challenge the lisbon24 app uses information from the intelligent management platform which then gives residents in real time updates on emergencies from traffic incidents to you know road work to even just the availability as we are talking about when it comes to those bikes in the parking stations so let's Let us know your thoughts, click on the link below, send us a question, we'll do our best to get you answers. Till next time, I'm Diana Blass reporting for Current Insights.