Cascais, Portugal
Cascais, Portugal is a coastal resort city of 211,000 people that attracts more than 1.2 million tourists a year and aims to be the “best place to live in a day or a lifetime.” The city has a mission to “test scalable and innovative solutions” to improve the efficiency of infrastructure, transportation, public safety, and other services. The company has developed a large portfolio of technology-based services, ranging from energy-efficient buildings to remote payment for parking.
However, Cascais faced challenges as it evolved its ecosystem and introduced new initiatives. One of the biggest obstacles was the lack of a unified vision across the 12 local government areas, from health and education to energy and public infrastructure. To address this issue, the City of Cascais developed the Managed Services Digital Command Center C2 in 2018 to provide a holistic and integrated approach to managing city operations in a multidisciplinary department. The solution leveraged Deloitte’s smart place operating system CitySynergy.
Cascais redefined the city’s operating model by integrating data and processes from each municipality’s vertical domain, rather than handling them in separate silos. Consolidation has improved the quality of services to the population and achieved cost reductions based on greater effectiveness and efficiency.
The city’s platform currently offers 15 smart initiatives (including a citizen connectivity website and citizen engagement app) with integrated maps of assets and dependencies, online dashboards, customized reports, and digital twins. It helps manage an ecosystem of over 30 service partners, enabling predictive management with event correlation and data analytics to accelerate decision-making and urban planning. “A command center with predictive capabilities that tries to predict the future, that’s what the people want in the future,” said Miguel Pinto-Luz, deputy mayor of Cascais.
C2 has helped businesses improve operations, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. For example, the city of Cascais has implemented a smart waste management system that is expected to reduce travel distances along the route by 180,000 kilometers, reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 350 tons per year, and save around 600,000 euros per year.16 By integrating real-time traffic and road condition data, the system not only optimizes routes but also identifies the best times for garbage collection, potentially reducing operating costs by up to 40% and increasing energy savings by up to 20%. The city of Cascais has also improved citizen satisfaction, achieving energy savings of 20-30% and a 30% reduction in water consumption. The city is proud of the results it has achieved by entering into service level agreements with its citizens.
Its efficiency allows Cascais to allocate resources more effectively and attract new companies, residents and universities, making it the most dynamic and advanced city in Portugal. More importantly, the model developed by Cascais could be replicated in other cities around the world. 17, 18
vienna, austria
Vienna was one of the first cities in the world to publish open government data in 2011, but its platform VeroCity has taken open data to a new level. Its data aggregation and analysis capabilities are based on the European Commission’s Context Broker building block, which can classify data of any type and source.19
Context Broker enables the platform to provide real-time visual information that caters to all stakeholders in a city. The platform facilitates everyday activities such as urban mobility, environmental monitoring, urban infrastructure management, and energy efficiency improvements. The platform provides users with access to visualized information, avoiding the need to review raw data details. This allows the city to enable transparency in monitoring and benchmarking while fostering citizen participation.
The city also launched WienBot, a chatbot that provides answers to users’ various questions while continuously learning from “conversations.” This ability to capture the most frequently asked questions and commonly used keywords allows the chatbot to suggest questions in advance. Currently, WienBot answers questions about the 250 most frequently accessed contents on the official website of the City of Vienna, www.wien.at. It also suggests other useful city services that may be useful to the user. The list of questions was recently updated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As a result of these efforts towards technical management of city operations, in 2019 Vienna was ranked first in the Smart City Strategy Index for the second year in a row.20, 21
Hong Kong
Hong Kong continues to enhance the use of AI in government and the public sector. The priority is continuous improvement of the city’s service management. For example, the city plans to deploy chatbots to use historical data to respond to citizen complaints and answer questions.
The city also plans to use AI for traffic management. The city is already collecting real-time traffic data on speed and traffic volume through sensors across 80% of its major routes to reduce congestion around the city.
The city has also installed sensors to collect data on landslides, pollution and water levels to better prepare for disasters, and also uses sensors to monitor energy usage.
In 20 years, one-third of Hong Kong’s population will be over 65 years old. The city plans to use robots to support the elderly and assist care workers. Additionally, a Hong Kong hospital deployed AI to schedule weekly tasks for thousands of nurses.
Visa applications are inspected by AI to prevent mistakes and fraud. The city also plans to transform its “digital persona” and use AI to create an e-Identity for every individual. This allows individuals with trusted credentials to successfully access private and public services online.23, 24
