Favorable time for businesses to build smart cities

Vietnam to build smart cities to tackle urban problems

Exhibition of Viettel smart city’s executive monitoring center. Photo: H. Diu.

Needing general solution

Resolution 52-NQ/TN by the Politburo says that by 2025, Vietnam has to have at least three smart cities in three key economic regions. By 2030, a number of smart urban chains will be formed in key economic regions in the North, South and Central region, connecting to the smart urban network in the region and the world. According to experts, building a smart city is a new task – it not only brings many benefits but also many difficulties and challenges. On the side of the Government, in early August 2018, the Prime Minister issued a Scheme on the development of Vietnam's sustainable smart cities in the period of 2018-2020 and orientation to 2030, which clearly defines the views and principles of smart urban development.

According to Mr. Nguyen Van Sinh, Deputy Minister of Construction, building smart cities requires cooperation and sharing – this is an indispensable requirement to be able to achieve the set goals. In addition, experts stressed that building and developing smart cities must ensure consistency, optimize technical and information technology infrastructure as well as have advanced science and technology solutions. The application of modern technologies must be compatible with many platforms, ensuring the safety of network security and people's personal information.

From the experience of building Korean smart cities, Mr. Kabsung Kim, Representative of the President's Committee on Smart Cities Advisory Committee, said that Vietnam needs to design an intelligent ecosystem, encouraging the participation of people and businesses. Therefore, South Korea has set out policies to encourage businesses to provide intelligent solutions and enhance sharing connectivity.

For Vietnamese enterprises, according to Mr. Nguyen Duc Kien, Director of the Center for System Integration and Solution, VNPT Information Technology Company, up to now, VNPT has participated in developing the project and signed agreements of developing smart cities with more than twenty provinces and cities. Therefore, businesses need to perform synchronous steps such as: surveying the current status, working with leaders to determine the priority level, and setting up a development roadmap based on financial capacity to develop smart cities.

Applying modern technology

For the development of smart cities, Mr. Nguyen Duc Kien emphasized the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Accordingly, AI will be applied in activities of executive direction, urban planning and management, digital government, transportation and education.AI will help analyze data to provide early warnings of revenue,expenditure and budget investment of the province; warnings for overloads in medical examination and treatment; predicting the number of patients; analysis of air environment; supporting planning; detecting violations automatically and detecting the faces of suspicious persons.

Wishing to apply high technology to smart cities, Mr. Nguyen Xuan Viet, Chief Technology Officer of FPT IS Information System Company, said that the enterprise proposed a solution to build a data bank, preferably to open high quality data sources and building API City. Accordingly, the data bank will be built by collecting all sources of data obtained from e-government and other sources; collecting sources of data from departments, sectors such as business, tax, finance, population.With this solution, all citizens and suppliers can use and help people participate better.

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For Samsung, this company said it has developed a solution to contribute to building a smart city. Mr. Vo Hong Hai, Director of the IT field and Business Division, Samsung Vina Electronics Company, said that Samsung is providing smart city solutions based on Brightics IoT connectivity platform. Brightics IoT can be understood as a structural platform, supporting real-time management, it also supports the control and evaluation of equipment used in an area, from buildings to cities. Brightics IoT offers four solutions including: smart building management, smart street lighting system, smart farm management and remote management.

It can be seen that businesses are very determined in the deployment and solutions to build smart cities. This is considered a favorable time for businesses to break through, choose appropriate technologies and solutions. However, businesses need to have proper awareness and appropriate human resources, while leaders must have a strategic vision to develop andspread investment.