In eastern France, Dijon is looking to step up its smart city game by getting its neighbours involved. The French city is joining forces with surrounding towns to embark on a €105 million information technology project that will improve city operations while helping save money on street lighting, traffic management and public safety. Working together with EDF's Citelum—as well as major French companies like Bouygues, Suez and Capgemini—the city plans to connect services like lighting through open data and smart city apps, thereby saving up to 65 percent in public lighting costs. Let’s take a closer look at what’s driving this 12-year project, and how it will have a dramatic and lasting effect on the city’s technology and infrastructure.— Bruno De Man
Driving change in Dijon
Dijon Métropole centres around the city of Dijon and includes 24 towns and cities, with a combined population of 256,000. With this new project, construction and telecom giants are coming together to significantly revamp the technology in these towns. One of the main highlights is the upgrade of 34,000 streetlights to LED, which will cut public lighting costs by more than half.
With the help of Citelum’s central management system, these new lights will not only save on energy, they’ll also work with the Internet of Things (IoT) connecting to the city’s infrastructure, such as traffic lights, security cameras and buses.
“On the platform, the city’s public services will have access to information about all the infrastructures of the municipality, efficiently plan maintenance interventions, optimize costs management, and inform their partners on their works progress,” according to Citelum.
Using the IoT, the city will be able to make its technical equipment like traffic lights and street lighting as efficient as possible, ensuring they’re maintained and functioning properly. These objects will also collect data that serves another purpose: smart city application development.
“Thanks to digital data generated by connected public facilities, Dijon metropolitan area wants to develop a unique smart city initiative, offering its residents new public services and open urban governance based on open data,” according to Suez.
Beyond apps, citizens will have the power to contact public services straight from their cell phones, signalling any problems they may be experiencing and ensuring a speedy response. The control centre is just the first phase of the plan as the city aims to put geotags on 205 vehicles and radio tags on another 130, which will lead to the “connected management of public spaces,” allowing the city to institute smart practices that can prioritize traffic and renovations, making Dijon—and the surrounding towns—technologically more progressive and efficient
