As a first step to revitalising Visakhapatnam into a smarter and more sustainable city, Fluentgrid Ltd (formerly Phoenix IT Solutions Ltd), in association with Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation (GVMC), has launched a state-of-the-art centralised City Command Center.
IBM, the Council’s lead partner in India, partnering with two other US-based organisations — AECOM and KPMG — has prepared the entire master plan for Vizag Smart City, marking a strong American role in the city’s ambitious plan.
City Command Center launched
Connecting for the first time multiple city-level services and providers onto a single platform, the newly launched City Command Center in Vizag will immediately usher in smarter and more efficient governance capabilities for GVMC, helping lay the foundation for implementing the city’s Smart City agenda. Interestingly, the Visakhapatnam center, which acts as a headquarters for the state, can be integrated in the future with all cities of Andhra Pradesh.
The center will be integrated with smart street lighting dashboards, air quality monitoring, integration of the water SCADA system for reservoir and city water distribution systems, more centralised solid waste monitoring capabilities, tools for revenue assurance and enhanced city surveillance, green maps for urban forestry monitoring and beach safety, amongst others.
How it will work
Fluentgrid’s time-tested mPower product suite will set up the entire ICT infrastructure for the command center. The center will display an executive dashboard with KPIs to monitor various department-level dashboards by analysing data and AV streams emerging from a wide variety of systems.
This data will be analysed and correlated with data coming from other departments to identify abnormal events, patterns and exceptions, to alert the concerned entities for further action. Any disruption in a city service or process will be reported as an incident which can be resolved as per SLAs.
Furthermore, any personnel from any department will be able to raise incidents through the system. When completed, the command center will be integrated with numerous kinds of data and AV feeds coming from various corners of the city administration with many integrations.
Dreaming San Francisco
Earlier last year, the Indian government signed agreements with the Obama administration to include Vizag as one amongst the three cities that will be developed as Smart Cities in collaboration with various US government agencies.
Building on this momentum, Vizag also ranked 8th in the 100 Smart Cities Challenge of India. It has an overwhelming 1.5 million citizens contributing to the Smart City plans, to identify various city-level services and issues.
For the larger project where the US agencies are involved, the government authorities have been benchmarking Vizag with San Francisco when it comes to the targeted outcomes. San Francisco was also chosen because of the geographical similarity. Situated in northern California, the city is on the tip of a peninsula, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean and a bay. San Francisco is also known for its hilly landscape, among other picturesque places. Vizag, too, has a hilly terrain, with several big formations such as Kailasagiri and Rishikonda overlooking the Bay of Bengal.
The quick wins
A perfect drainage system, 24-hour water supply, cycling tracks, an intelligent transportation system, complete Wi-Fi connectivity, pollution monitoring, smart meter usage for electricity consumption and transforming existing slums into normal neighbourhoods are among the quick win projects initiated by the Greater Visakhapatnam Smart City Corporation Ltd, a Special Purpose Vehicle incorporated under the Companies Act. The state and the urban local body are the promoters, each having half the equity. Around Rs 2,000 crore will be spent on these quick-win projects.
