Last week I was in Istanbul to participate in the World Cities Congress Istanbul 2019, which was sponsored by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. I participated in two panels. One on Smart 4 Technologies and another on Smart Energy. Istanbul is a municipality of over 15 million in a country of 80 million. Istanbul is a megacity, which is defined as a city that is larger than 10 million people. As a megacity Istanbul has turned to smart technologies to answer the challenges of urbanization, with more efficient delivery of city services and increasing the quality and accessibility of such services as transportation, energy, healthcare, and social services. Smart cities also offer great opportunities for transformation and optimization of the urban economy with production systems based on information and technology. Hitachi is engaged with Istanbul to deliver Smart City Solutions. Here are some of the Smart City projects that Hitachi is supporting in Turkey.
Hitachi Establishes Strategic Regional Center for Healthcare Business in Istanbul
Istanbul is building a large airport with the capacity to service 150 Million people per year. One of the drivers for the new airport in Istanbul is the medical tourism business that is attracting people in the region with state of the art medical services. Istanbul’s strategic location and intellectual resources was the reasons for Hitachi Health care to establish a Regional Center for Healthcare in Istanbul in 2017. Hitachi will provide a healthcare business platform to strengthen operation services for hospital imaging and diagnostic systems, surgical treatment solutions and radiation therapy systems in Central Asia, Middle East, and Africa as well as Turkey. Hitachi will collaborate with companies in Turkey to deliver state of the art health care solutions that will contribute to the development of healthcare and improve the quality of life in the region.
Istanbul Buyuksehir Belediyesi, Traffic Management & Violation Detection System
Istanbul’s Traffic Management & violation detection system uses thousands of endpoint devices with detectors, cameras and other sensors. Fines are issued according to the records on them. The requirement was to centralize and archive the data collected from these endpoint devices while keeping with regulation requirements. Hitachi Vantara provided HCP object storage to replace traditional storage for ease of access, search and index, privacy regulations and hybrid cloud.
City of Istanbul Governorship: Safe, Smart Campus
The challenge was to secure the governorship campus and include multiple existing video and IoT systems. The solution was to implement Hitachi Vantara’s Smart Spaces solution with Video Intelligence to integrate disparate systems into a single view. This enables real time alerts and analysis from facial recognition, traffic and parking, queue detection, people counting and license plate recognition. Smart cameras and edge devices provide situational awareness and end to end smart security.
Türkiye Petrol Rafinerileri (Tupras) | Opening the Data Lake to Data Science
Tupras operates four oil refineries processing crude from global markets. Time consuming manual steps made it difficult to make quick decisions in refinery operations. Data silos inhibited the collaboration between management engineers and IT resulting in short sighted and or incorrect decisions. They used a time series data base (TSDB) which is optimized for measuring change over time and makes time series data very different than other data workloads. Open-source monitoring solutions such as openTSDB lack analytics and smart alerting. They can also be a challenge to scale for capacity and maintain for reliability and performance. Tupras had no unified/scalable way to discover the (sliced content) on open TSDB and no framework for data science and no way to operationalize data science. The solution was to use Pentaho which connects natively to openTSDB, eliminating the need for 3rdparty vendors and leveraging distributed compute. Pentaho unlocked mapR to enable data science and enabled business users to operationalize data through self-service. This improved lead time from 2 days to less than 10 minutes. This also enabled the data science team, which included IT, data engineers and business analysts with the tools for data preparation and operationalize algorithms. They have a unified data architecture with one set of tools to unlock relevant sources of data.
One Hitachi
Hitachi Healthcare and Hitachi Vantara are two of the 5 Hitachi Companies in Turkey working as one Hitachi. The others are Kenki, the construction company, Hitachi Rail, and Hitachi Europe. Hitachi Kenki has the largest presence due to the many construction projects in Turkey. Hitachi Vantara is best known for enterprise storage which we sell primarily to financial services, telcos, and energy companies that have high availability requirements, but is also gaining recognition for big data and data analytics. Hitachi Europe has introduced Finger Vein biometrics for ATMs. Here is just a sampling of projects which Hitachi supports in Turkey.
Hitachi delivers value-based outcomes with IoT solutions that bring devices, people, infrastructure and processes together. To learn more about Hitachi’s Smart City Solutions, click here