Caspar Herzberg, COO of AVEVA, shares five examples where cities have improved their sustainability and resilience while lowering costs.

There is an increasing trend for cities to become ‘smart’ and demand for a centralised Command and Control Centre. The Smart City concept integrates information and communication technology (ICT), and various physical devices connected to the IoT network to optimize the efficiency of city operations and services and connect to citizens.

ICT is used to enhance quality, performance, and interactivity of urban services, to reduce costs and resource consumption and to increase contact between citizens and government. All while realising sustainability goals and striving for net zero. However, the sheer complexity of disparate data silos, multi-vendor system architectures, and the many millions of citizens relying on their infrastructure to participate in an economically viable solution remains a genuine challenge.

The appetite to explore the benefits of Smart Cities is also being ignited due to rapid urbanisation as many cities have old and aging infrastructure with high replacement costs. Converting existing infrastructure to Smart Infrastructure is the key to improving cities as it directly correlates to improvements in the quality of life and sustainability.

Acting on data driven insights

City resilience reflects the overall capacity of a city (individuals, communities, institutions, businesses and systems) to survive, adapt and to thrive. To help quantify a city’s resilience capability, Arup and the Rockefeller Foundation partnered to develop the City Resilience Index (CRI), a quantitative measure of this capacity. The CRI provides a holistic articulation of city resilience, structured around four dimensions, 12 goals and 52 indicators that are critical to measuring the resilience of our cities.

When most people think about city resilience, their minds often turn to topics like sustainable design, city planning, redundant infrastructure and emergency management services. Recently, London mayor Sadiq Khan announced the UK capital’s first-ever resilience strategy, which was developed as part of the global 100 Resilient Cities Project. The strategy highlights new threats to the city’s safety and stability, including extreme weather events that lead to flooding and drought.

Among the areas of focus in London’s strategy are more effective and sustainable use of water to address drought conditions; better coordinated response to emergency conditions and terrorist attacks; innovative use of data to maintain London’s interlinked infrastructure; and improved cybersecurity.

City resilience in action

AVEVA works with megacities like London, as well as smaller municipalities with populations of 50,000 or fewer, who are looking to leverage technology to help improve their sustainability and resilience.

Below are five examples where AVEVA was able to either improve sustainability and resilience while lowering their overall cost of operations and man-hours to deliver to the expected service levels.

  1. India: Home to some 2 million residents and renowned for its extensive industry, Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) aims to become India’s most liveable city by 2030 and serve as a lighthouse for the Indian Government’s ‘100 Smart Cities’ mission. Using AVEVA Unified Operations Center to centralize and improve the efficiency of the city’s IT and infrastructure applications and communications, PCMC has reduced pollution, traffic congestion, and water losses, and expects to reduce energy use by up to 22%.


  2. United Kingdom: Leaks threatened to overwhelm Yorkshire Water with regulatory fines, customer complaints, and maintenance costs. Then, with the help of Capula, an automation and real-time integrator in the United Kingdom, it implemented new AVEVA PI System technology. Now Yorkshire is cutting costs, meeting regulatory goals, and serving customers more efficient. Now, Yorkshire identifies leaks one and a half days before they reach threshold limits, and users receive alerts four and a half days faster than they did before


  3. Germany: Approximately 40% of our total energy use comes from heating, cooling and operating buildings. So, when the City of Bremen in Germany was looking to standardize the way it manages the buildings within its purview to reduce energy consumption, it sought to implement a common building management system for all of its properties. By centralizing building control and implementing best practices among all property managers, Bremen was able to save between 15 and 18% on its annual power bills, effectively lowering the overall carbon footprint of the city.


  4. Canada: In the City of Toronto, officials wanted to make sure they were maintaining their critical water infrastructure as efficiently as possible. This included making sure they managed their spare parts and maintenance inventory, so they always had the right parts to keep their systems running but did not waste money by overstocking redundant or non-critical parts. By implementing Enterprise Asset Management software, the City of Toronto ensures that water and wastewater staff have readily available, accurate, and relevant information to help them be more effective in executing the work management process, whether during day-to-day operations or when a critical emergency arises.


  5. United States: Gwinnett County Department of Water Resources has set its focus on sustainability while producing more than 70 million gallons a day for more than a million residents. Gwinnett County worked with AVEVA and its partner to implement multi-tiered Historians and Galaxies to gain visibility and insight into operations. The Unified Operations Center collects a half million data points from multiple sites spanning water production plants, distribution and transmission networks, and hundreds of water collection points. Gwinnett County has incorporated a broad range of AVEVA products to architect a secure solution to provide access and deliver data to match necessary roles. This spans from OMI at the plant floor to provide operations key information for improved maintenance up to AVEVA's cloud-based offerings to utilize Machine Learning to reduce energy consumption and increase performance.

Connect, collect, analyse

For Smart Cities to be efficient, they must be able to connect, collect, analyse and act from disparate data sources. First, a Smart City connects and collects information about itself through sensors, other devices and existing systems. Next, it communicates that data using wired or wireless networks. Third, it analyses that data to understand what is happening now, what is likely to happen next, and finally it must act based on this intelligence. This transformative approach spans across various applications, including facilities management, utilities, telecommunication, transportation, health and e-Governance.

In the increasingly complex world of infrastructure, technology is a powerful unifying asset. What our examples have shown is that a holistic command and control center based on an integrative approach can be extremely effective to leverage information and resolve problems even before they are presented, coordinate various resources and processes to operate seamlessly, and generally help make more strategic decisions.

Transformation is hard. Success requires real commitment and engagement from the top, but the rewards are impactful for individuals, communities and the planet.