Tech-savvy Hangzhou tries out new 'City Brain'

A local official talks about Hangzhou's "City Brain" plan during a forum in 2016. [Photo/IC]

At 10:05 am on Oct 9, an ambulance standing by at Xinnan Road in Hangzhou's Xiaoshan district received a call about an emergency seven kilometers away.

To arrive at its destination, the ambulance needed to be driven to the north along Shixin Road, a nearly half-hour ride that took it through 21 traffic lights.

This time, however, it only took about 14 minutes to finish the journey - the smoothest trip the ambulance driver said he'd ever taken.

In reality, the Oct 9 "emergency" was a field test for managing a route through local traffic, using Hangzhou's "City Brain", an intelligent system for urban management.

As the ambulance departed, the urban data processors constructed a variety of driving route models based on the information collected via mobile maps and road video cameras, working out each one and generating an optimal traffic plan in only a second.

Standing in front of the monitoring screen in the Xiaoshan public security commanding center, Ying Donghui, deputy chief officer of the Xiaoshan public security bureau, was under more pressure than the driver. As a veteran traffic police officer with 27 years of working experience, he is the director of the test project.

Urban traffic is a key factor affecting the development of a city and the well-being of its residents, Ying said, adding that "the biggest dream of a traffic police officer is to make the city's traffic safer, more orderly and more efficient". Through the digital City Brain, he and those working with him will continue to improve the quality of governance in the city.

In recent months, the traffic police in Xiaoshan district have conducted more than 60 field traffic tests like this one and the test results were satisfactory, Ying said.

Thanks to the digital system, the efficiency of vehicles responding to 110, 119, 120 - the hotlines for crimes, fire and emergency rescue - and other special vehicles increased by 50 percent and the average time they spent on any single mission was shortened by seven minutes.

Hangzhou launched the City Brain traffic pilot project in April 2016, and, according to the city, within one year, the ranking of Hangzhou in terms of traffic congestion dropped from the top three cities in China in 2015 to 48th place.

For Chen Ting, a Hangzhou resident, the concept of the City Brain is a little bit vague. But after the project was launched, she can easily see of the changes, especially on her way from home to work, a commute that now requires three minutes less than before.

The successful operation of the system in Hangzhou in the field of transportation has made people see the broader prospects of the adoption of the internet in urban management.

Besides traffic congestion, the system is now being used to warn about infrastructure damage and to predict bad weather.

In July 2017, Hangzhou began to use the City Brain project, mainly based on big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, to handle urban governance issues and build a smart city.

To date, Hangzhou's urban management administration authorities have collected nearly 4 billion pieces of information.

A large number of local companies including Alibaba Group have provided technical support to the project.

The operation of the City Brain in Hangzhou provides a specific scenario - not only including the usage of hardware but also the idea of its application. It will also provide new opportunities for the city's development in the digital economy, according to the working team that initiated the City Brain project.

As the driver of the transformation led by digital methods, the City Brain project will make the concept of "connecting everything online" realized in every industry, thereby boosting economic growth and benefiting the people's livelihood, according to the team.