SMART CITY , GIS and FIVE PILLARS

What is smart  city

People migrate to cities primarily in search of employment and economic activities

beside better quality of life. Therefore, a Smart City for its sustainability needs to offer

economic activities and employment opportunities to a wide section of its residents,

regardless of their level of education, skills or income levels. In doing so, a Smart City

needs to identify its comparative or unique advantage and core competence in

specific areas of economic activities and promote such activities aggressively, by

developing the required institutional,physical, social and economic

infrastructures for it and attracting investors and professionals to take up

such activities. It also needs to support the required skill development for such

activities in a big way. This would help a Smart City in developing the required

environment for creation of economic activities and employment opportunities.

Smart City  GIS and Five pllars

GIS  five “pillars” namely Power, Water, Transport, Solid Waste Management and Safeguarding (Public Safety) and identifies enablers to better utilize Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). Governance, Planning, Infrastructure & networks, Data analytics, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Cyber Security have been identified as enablers. In reality GIS is similar to any other IT enterprise component, but for some reason GIS has been identified as a separate enabler. Ideally a “secure” GIS based IT enterprise should have been considered which - offers capability for “analytics”, can be used for “planning” and thus support in effective and efficient “governance”.

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Geographic Information Systems

The report refers to GIS as a “…system that involves superimposition of several layers of geo-data and information systems in a specific sequence to create a comprehensive geospatial / geographic information system”. Technically this statement still holds good, but gone are the days when GIS was used for viewing thematic maps and little bit of spatial analysis. Today GIS systems offers much more than that. A GIS can be integrated with – non-spatial data, multiple databases, multiple systems, real-time sensors and devices and so on and can be made available on cloud, web, mobile or desktop environments. I would prefer calling it “A system / solution that can capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of data in a geographical context”.

Some observations specific to the way forward :

Power – Smart Grid does not find any reference to GIS. GIS is critical component of a smart grid facilitating effective and efficient - network management, asset management, consumer Information management, workforce management and outage management. Integration of call centres, billing, payments and other sensors from SCADA with GIS in a real-time scenario can offer actionable intelligence for plugging pilferage's, outage management and restoration and so on.

Solid Waste - Long term proposal recommends applying of GIS and GPS solutions to enable route optimization and process improvement. With GIS deployment and GPS enablement proposed as a medium term plan, ideally route optimization and process improvement can be accomplished at this stage itself. Most of the GIS softwares come with route planning and optimization tools now a days.

Water– While it addresses GIS integration, the report misses on pipeline distribution management, asset management, water quality monitoring and management etc. which are key components of water systems. With percentage of Non-revenue water (NRW) high in the Indian context, GIS can offer actionable intelligence to bring down the NRW.

Traffic – Smart traffic management could be accomplished on a GIS based platform. The smart surveillance can be integrated with such system and graduated to Intelligent Traffic Management System. In addition such system can also be used for planning, monitoring and maintenance of transport networks, asset management etc. which are critical components of traffic management.

Safeguarding (Public Safety) – City Surveillance, Command Control and CAD are addressed as separate entities. Ideally this should be an integrated system. It describes “CAD vehicles”, “GIS & GPS enabled vehicles” - in reality CAD is a software solution / system. On command control, a GIS based CAD system can be scaled up by integrating video feeds and multiple sensor data to offer enhanced locational awareness of the incident location. This can further be graduated to City Surveillance systems.