Japanese IT giant NEC has announced it has won a contract to install smart city infrastructure in Lisbon, in a project due to begin by the end of the year.
According to city officials in the Portuguese capital, the aim is to boost security and improve quality of life for residents, by improving the daily operation and coordination of multiple city services.
NEC will use its Cloud City Operation Center (CCOC) to integrate 10 internal systems managed by Lisbon’s city government (such as city refuse collectors, for example) and 30 external systems managed by city partners (such as firefighters). The company will build a Municipal Service Operation Center capable of overseeing the entire city.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and IoT technologies will be used for real-time collection and analysis of information from around the city, so that city services can respond to situations such as illegally parked vehicles or suspicious objects.
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Quality of life
“In an effort to improve the urban environment as our city’s population increases and the number of tourists rises, Lisbon is striving to better the quality of life and strengthen security,” said Jorge Maximo, Lisbon city councillor for sports, information systems and citizen relations.
The municipality of Lisbon has around 545,200 residents and forms part of the wider Lisbon metropolitan area, which is home to more than one in four of the country’s total population.
Travel and tourism, meanwhile, is a vital industry for the country and is booming. The number of tourists visiting Portugal grew 13 percent in 2016, to exceed 10 million for the first time – the sixth consecutive year of record growth.
Said Maximo: “To accelerate the digital transformation of the city as a whole, we will use NEC’s CCOC for cross-integration of environmental data, data from various external entities, data from numerous municipal departmental applications and data collected using IoT devices.”
NEC has previously worked on similar smart city projects in Santander, Spain and Wellington, New Zealand.