Powered by Huawei Cloud Stack's CityCore, Shenzhen's Futian District Becomes Smart City Benchmark in China

Futian District is the center for government administration, finance, culture, commerce, and international exchange in Shenzhen. It not only has the highest population density and highest level of economic activity in Shenzhen, but also ranks among the highest globally. As a frontier of China's reform and opening-up, Futian District has taken the lead in digital transformation.

In the cloud age, smart cities have entered a new phase. They are becoming more people-centric and intelligent, and are capable of all-domain sensing, fast end-to-end coordination, and automatic handling of incidents and complaints.

Powered by CityCore, Huawei Cloud Stack's Smart City solution, Futian District's new government service platform was launched in April 2022. The main goal of this new platform has been to enable fast responses to and fast closures of issues reported by the district's residents.

The platform implements intelligent, fine-grained, data-driven city management where every element is deeply integrated and well coordinated. Specifically, it enables the intelligent deduplication of events and incidents reported from all channels, the intelligent dispatch of events and incidents from end to end, the intelligent analysis of all elements, and the intelligent tracking of the handling process via reminders.

The CityCore solution that Huawei Cloud Stack provides to Futian District mainly consists of an integration platform, AI platform, CIM platform, blockchain platform, and online video platform. These platforms work in tandem to continuously power intelligent applications for smart cities.

Data silos and isolated systems were a long-standing problem. The integration platform connects different capability platforms to provide unified service interfaces for intelligent applications. It eliminates silos by connecting the systems of different government agencies, offices, bureaus, and communities. In addition, one-stop management of the release, subscription, approval, and monitoring of software assets facilitates insight into, and availability and traceability of the government's digital assets.

Manual operations led to low efficiency. The AI platform provides intelligent computational and analytical capabilities and digital services to power the applications of different departments and agencies, such as the intelligent discovery of events and incidents from video, grid cell-based inspection, and quick response to public opinions and sentiments. The new government service platform allows for the majority of service tickets to be allocated automatically. Each service ticket is allocated in just 50 seconds, instead of the former 4 minutes. Accuracy also reaches 90%.

Lack of data convergence was a common problem. The City Information Modeling (CIM) platform provides high-precision 3D modeling of the entire district and drives deep integration between ground and underground, indoor and outdoor, 2D and 3D, and spatial and government service data, powering CIM applications and enabling digitalization of all elements involved in city management, real-time visualization of how the city is operating, and intelligent, collaborative decision-making process.

Remaining open while maintaining security compliance was a challenge for many data platforms. The blockchain platform strikes a perfect balance between the two. It helps to build a user-centric system where data can be safely shared in a trusted environment to ensure compliance. The platform creates a closed loop of data aggregation, utilization, operations, and opening. Privacy-enhancing computation ensures transparent and fast sharing and processing of data between multiple parties while ensuring user privacy.

Secure and orderly sharing and mining of video resources was a huge challenge. The online video platform consolidates video resources in all of Futian District. It ingests over 100,000 channels of video, and provides 10,000 channels for concurrent video parsing on the AI platform. This enables fast yet secure sharing of video resources, and allows for fast value extraction.

Futian's CityCore platform emphasizes the interconnection and interaction between different platforms and advocates the integration of data, applications, and systems. The CityCore platform serves as an aggregation point for massive amounts of data and an intelligent center for coordinated dispatching and problem handling, so that there are much fewer isolated, uncoordinated operations.

Mr. Gao Zeng, Deputy Director of the Government Service Data Management Bureau for Futian District, said: "The CityCore platform, jointly developed by Futian District and Huawei, is a benchmark that ushers in a new phase of smart cities."

The fruits of digitalization and a glimpse of the future

The CityCore platform, which integrates data, AI, processes, and CIM, is the foundation and core engine of Futian District's digital transformation. It helps to fully unleash the power of data; drive all-domain data sharing, fast allocation and transfer of service tickets, and AI enablement for all scenarios; and support coordinated management and services in all of Futian District across different layers, regions, systems, and functional departments.

In addition to unified government services, the CityCore platform for Futian District is also driving the evolution of other intelligent applications.

The CityCore platform aggregates all data elements to provide data dashboards that visualize the operation of the entire city. According to Mr. Gao Zeng, using the CityCore platform, Futian District has built a comprehensive metric system, categorized by five different domains and 10 major topics, that has been embedded into the websites of all its street-level offices and functional departments to enable real-time monitoring of the entire district. This enables fast responses to events and incidents, fast coordination between different departments and teams, and data-driven decision-making.

The CityCore platform breaks down department silos and streamlines operations. Futian District actively connected its data systems to provincial platforms for the purpose of streamlining service handling, data, and operations, and aligning service models, data sharing, and user authentication with the provincial and municipal platforms. This drives the integration and optimization of government service platforms. Government employees can access office applications anytime and from anywhere, with higher efficiency and smoother collaboration.

The CityCore platform enables more convenient government services for all residents. Based on this platform, Futian District has developed a unique resident ID system that enables easy, unified access to all government services. Government service information is better shared, services are much faster and are digitally managed from end to end. Government services are provided proactively and with higher precision, offering both individuals and businesses more convenient services and higher efficiency.

Powered by the CityCore platform, Futian District's digital transformation has been fruitful. At the China Region Award Ceremony for the World's Smart City Expo Congress 2022, Futian District was awarded the "World Smart City Award", outcompeting 126 peer smart city projects from 44 cities. Futian District is committed to further driving the coordinated development of the digital economy, digital government, digital lives, and digital ecosystems, so that it will continue to set a high bar for smart cities both in China and across the globe.