THE age of the AI and Internet of Things (IoT) has introduced an increasingly broad range of sensors and IoT platforms, data and way to find insights. Many of these have made their way to the smart cities sector.
All such technologies hold the best promise for providing unification and context to a huge array of data generated by smart cities and turning them into actionable, contextualised information to reduce crime, energy consumption and operational costs while improving urban safety and quality of life.
Adding a new dimension to this, L&T’s Smart World & Communication (SWC) arm has now rolled out the first in-house developed software platform, named L&T Fusion.
L&T Fusion is a one-stop-shop integrated platform offering smart solutions in public safety, smart cites, mobility and energy domains. It provides real-time contextual insights, actionable intelligence and common operating picture for urban administrators, law enforcement officials and field officers through convergence of video AI, IoT, data analytics and intelligent automation technologies.
Mr J D Patil (L&T’s Whole-time Director & Sr EVP – Defence & Smart Technologies) launched this latest smart solution on 7 April in the presence of Mr R Srinivasan (EVP & Head – SWC) and Mr J V S Ramakrishna (Head - Strategy, Solutions & Platform). “Fusion is the beginning of the next era for Smart World”, he said, emphasising how developing in-house intellectual property in cutting-edge technologies will enable SWC to transform into a thought leader and partner for cities and law enforcement agencies.
L&T Fusion’s capabilities are vast, and encompass:
• Integrated Command & Control Centre (ICCC)
• Women Safety mobile application with SOS alert, escort me and track me request
• Social media analytics for trending events and tracking of tweets/ hashtags
• Patrol management for improved patrolling and crime deterrence
• Crime analytics for actionable insights from real time and historical data
UNIQUE FEATURES
L&T Fusion includes distributed computing, messaging, and massive scaling using Kubernetes, which follows the principle of containers. Containers solve a critical issue in the life of application runtime and maintenance arising due to different operating systems and different libraries in a production and deployment environment.
It is built with the idea to provide a City Operating System (command, control and execution), wherein all city functions are managed using a single platform. It allows systems to be integrated and embedded to extend its features list. It allows adding in-house, third party and other systems to provide Integrated operations view of an entire city.
As technology evolves, L&T Fusion, as a hub, would still be able to integrate and upgrade systems and functions required to run smart cities. It is designed on distributed computing and event-driven Service Oriented Architecture (SOA 2.0), combining the intelligence and proactiveness of event-driven architecture with the organisational capabilities found in SOA. All the above features combine will allow use case for different segments to be quickly build on the top of same platform.
In the Industrial IoT architecture, L&T Fusion platform resides at the enterprise level and performs many functions, including analytics, remote asset monitoring, performance management, and decision support and/or presentation components. It also includes:
• Visualisation based on user levels
• Application enablement
• Data management using Data Lake
• Device management
• Cybersecurity to defend against attacks
BENEFITS
L&T Fusion covers the entire operational flow to provide safety. It also improves liveability, sustainability and economic development. Integrating various sensors and data such as surveillance cameras in a city, L&T Fusion provides enforcement automation through Machine Learning and image processing to improve efficiency of law enforcement services.
It performs multi-agency operations for normal and emergency day operation where different agencies of city can come together for smooth functioning of a city. It undertakes event management, crime prevention capability, emergency/incident management, traffic management and multi-agency operations.
Collaboration tools, modern and intuitive websites, mobile applications, self-service portals, and convenient online accounts have become the standard in many facets of life, and citizens expect no less from their city. Deploying smart technologies helps alleviate the burden of manual tasks that many city employees face every day. L&T Fusion thus improves lives.
ECONOMIC FUNCTIONING
Automation brings operational efficiency and cost savings, with AI-based and IoT technologies automating city resources such as field officer, water and electricity, and saving significant amounts of money by doing so.
Ensuring efficiency, smart city sensors are making sure that resources are used without losses, increasing efficiency and saving money. Connectivity, the smart-city feature of having every device connected to each other, improves the city’s performance and this is strongly connected to its economy.
REAL-RUN IN RAIPUR
Government of India picked up Raipur to be developed into a smart city under the fast-track mode. Raipur Smart City Ltd (RSCL) selected SWC as the master system integrator to design and assist in implementing the Intelligent Traffic Management System (ITMS), City Surveillance System, and ICCC.
The project involves implementation and integration of several systems and components. These include the establishment of ITMS, City Surveillance, ICCC with provisioning of ICT infrastructure for data centre and disaster recovery along with integration of sub-systems already present in the city or envisaged, such as solid waste management, smart parking, multi-modal transport systems, smart poles, smart governance, sewerage, e-medicine and so on.
The project has been completed and is now operational. Its command and control centre, fully integrated with the smart solutions through L&T Fusion, has played a crucial role as COVID control room.
