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October 25, 2016

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Home » City specials » Hangzhou

Brainpower to tackle city traffic headache

By Xu Wenwen | October 25, 2016, Tuesday | Print Edition

NO matter what day of the week, urban Hangzhou gets snarled in traffic jams. Weekdays, it’s bumper-to-bumper for the work commute; weekends, it’s bumper-to-bumper around the city’s tourist spots.

In fact, Hangzhou traffic ranks as the fifth most congested in China and the 30th in the world, according to 2015 report from TomTom, a Dutch company involved in navigation and mapping products.

Hangzhou is out to change its dismal status. It has unveiled a big data project called City Brain to tackle traffic gridlock with smart technology.

The new system will collect data from traffic lights and monitors at intersections. Numbers of cars will be counted. Whether they go straight, left or right at intersections will be logged.

Collating all the data, the “brain” in the system can then work out the best traffic signal durations for intersections down the road. It can rearrange lanes and even prohibit left or right turns, depending on traffic.


Wang Jian, Chairman of Alibaba Group Technology Steering Committee, told the Yunqi Computing Conference recently that traffic lights and surveillance cameras located on a single pole at intersections had never been connected before.

Hangzhou-based Alibaba Cloud is among the 13 technology companies involved in City Brain.

The city has more than 50,000 monitors working 24 hours a day, but it is impossible for humans to watch all of them. With Alibaba’s Apsara cloud platform, sensors and other software, the images will be turned into data that is collected by millions of servers and then transmitted to the “brain.”

Three months ago, the new system underwent a test run in Xiaoshan District of Hangzhou. Traffic speeds on different roadways were raised, on average, by about 3 percent, with some as high as 11 percent.

The city of Guangzhou in southern China introduced the “brain” system last month, and traffic speeds were raised by 25 percent during a test on one road.

“The Hangzhou government and the 13 IT companies don’t look at the ‘brain’ as a product for this city alone, but rather as an innovation for the whole country,” said Hong Qinghua, director of the local Economic and Information Commission.

He said up to 11 municipal departments have been involved in the project. By the end of the year, City Brain is expected to be functioning across the city.

“Our prime goal is that by 2022, Hangzhou won’t need traditional traffic control,” said Wang.

That’s a challenging goal in a city of more than 9 million people and almost 3 million cars, where the topography of waterways and mountains limited wide highways and a massive subway system.

City Brain’s applications go beyond just traffic. According to government officials, it will also serve systems related to urban governance and provision of social services. For example, energy and water infrastructure will be digitalized to provide better allocation of public resources.

Alibaba’s Yunqi Computing Conference, which unveiled details of City Brain, is a part of the West Lake International Expo, which runs until October 31.

The expo is sharing the latest in advanced technologies and discussing pioneering ideas.

Technology is set to enter many aspects of daily life. At the China Hangzhou Cultural and Creative Industry Expo, which ended last weekend, the use of virtual reality technology in film, artworks, and even personal meditation was displayed.

SightPlus Information Technology from Shanghai exhibited an augmented reality product that can scan a real estate advertisement in a newspaper by phone, showing a home for sale in three-dimensional dynamic.

Hangzhou LKK Smart Design Co exhibited a maglev sound box, a robot toy interacting with children and a smart rice container designed to alert families of old people living alone when the container is nearing empty.

“Smart life won’t be very far off,” said Wei Yubao, manager of LKK. “The technology is not very mature yet, but it is progressing very rapidly.”

Among other events included in the West Lake International Expo are the China Smart Energy Industry and Internet Conference, the Hangzhou Automobile Industry Expo and the China Electronic Commerce Expo.

West Lake Expo is expected to attract US$1 billion in foreign investment and 10 billion yuan (US$1.48 billion) in domestic investment. About eight million people are expected to visit the exhibition.

Hangzhou


 

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