Why Dubai Might Be The World's Smartest City By 2017

Launched in 2014, Dubai’s Smart City initiative, Smart Dubai, is driven by the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, to make Dubai the world’s smartest and happiest city. The Smart Dubai initiative is comprised of six focus areas: smart life, smart transportation, smart society, smart economy, smart governance and smart environment. The project is designed to encourage collaboration between the public and private sectors to achieve all the targets in each of the six focus areas, and they expect 1000 government services to go smart over the next few years.

Below are listed the main Initiative. 

• Connected Law Enforcement – Connected police cars (multi-radio including Wi-Fi) and officers are the center of this initiative with technology in the cars and dashboards feeding a police operations center. Real-time information is available on the status of personnel (heart rate, location, and horizontal/vertical position) as well as video and GPS feeds for the vehicles themselves.

• Connected Lighting and Parking – A network that lets you locate and reserve parking spots, along with providing directions to get there. The lighting system has adaptive lighting control, dimming, power consumption and fault detection among other features.
• Connected Waste Management – Functions include current capacity of bins, route optimization, emergency requests for empty.
• Connected Bus and Bus Shelters – Real-time information on bus routes, current bus location, occupancy numbers and when they will arrive at your location. All of this information is available from mobile applications or at kiosks located physically in bus shelters (Note: because of the heat bus shelters are enclosed in Dubai).

• Remote Expert Centers for Government Services – One of the more useful applications I saw, these small, remote centers have audio and video connections to a manned government operations center as well as printers and scanners to allow you to transact normal government business from within the remote center applications for business licenses, driver’s license renewal, etc.).

If you are interested in video demonstrations of the Dubai Smart City implementations, they can be found here:

• IoT WF Smart City Experience Tour Introduction
• Connected Law Enforcement
• Connected Lighting & Parking
• Remote Government Expert
• Connected Aviation
• Connected Education @ MBRSG
• Connected Bus & d3 Tour
• Command and Control Center @ d3

Source: Mike Krell.Forbes

Mike Krell is an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy covering the Internet of Things (IoT)