The beginning of a digital transformation journey 

Our customer has a clear vison “to transform its capital into a world-class smart city and increase the standard of living”. But how to transfer this into reality?  

Siemens Advanta was requested to focus on two top priorities within the program: 1) crowd management and 2) an overarching dashboard to optimize transportation operations. 

The project team’s challenge for crowd management revolved around which data to collect and how to monitor and analyze it so that people flows could be simulated and predicted with as much accuracy as possible.  

For the overarching dashboard, the question was how to collate data from various stakeholders – particularly from transportation providers – and integrate it on one user friendly interface, respecting at the same time the criticality of the data. 

Digital twin as the basis 

With support from local Siemens colleagues, and in alignment with multiple public and private stakeholders, our experts assessed the challenges. It quickly became clear that we needed to leverage our proprietary City Graph solution, that utilizes digital twin technology, to tackle the first use case for crowd management and its sheer amount of data and levels of complexity.  

Our experts integrated, aggregated and analyzed historic and real-time data from various stakeholders and different sources, such as traffic systems, mobile networks, and geolocation services. With everything in place, it was possible to monitor, predict and simulate crowd situations in changing scenarios.  

In parallel, a second team concentrated on the overarching dashboard for all transportation operators.  Real-time data from the operational systems of various stakeholders, like the metro and public bus authorities, taxi providers, parking areas, traffic systems, and the airport, were combined with the crowd management solution. Thanks to data analytics, automated alarms and notifications are issued within the dashboard when certain thresholds are surpassed. Extended reporting capabilities covering different focus topics like the achieved performance and situational summaries are also available. The stakeholders who contribute data also benefit from individual dashboards for their respective disciplines.

A huge step closer to the vision 

Today, our digital twin solution makes it possible to monitor live crowd situations and predict the near future to help our client to manage their crowded areas more effectively and efficiently. Furthermore, it enables them to simulate various scenarios and thus provide advanced planning to avert potentially dangerous situations.   

Thanks to the overarching transportation dashboard that provides a “single pane of glass” view, it is possible to optimize the availability of transportation capacity. This pays out in daily life but also for major events.  Transportation offering can be based on demand, meaning no more guesswork on how many buses, metros or taxis to dispatch. That has of course led to an increase in passenger satisfaction – plus a reduction in operational costs and carbon emissions. 

Crowd management and the transportation dashboard are just the beginning: together with our customer we’re exploring how the program can be extended to further improve city operations, safety, and well-being to enable the realization of the city’s vison.