It doesn’t take more than ” two seconds “ and a click on the man in the dark suit and pink tie to display the water consumption of the SA07 building, view the electricity consumption, find out the number of people present on the first floor and check that the temperature is properly regulated there. Precisely, this Wednesday in March, when it is already nearly 30 ° C outside, and the air conditioners are running at full speed, two neighboring buildings exceed the thresholds initially set, he explains to his audience, to whom he makes the owner’s turn behind a screen. The maintenance team is notified, they can adjust the shooting.
The Universal Exhibition, organized in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, lasted six months, welcomed 20 million visitors, before closing its doors at the end of March. However, throughout this period, a simple application enabled a team of technicians and engineers, including Afzal Shabaz Mohammed, the man with the pink tie, innovation manager of the local Siemens office, to read in real time bowels of this mini-city that came out of the ground for the occasion and to oversee its operation. No less than 200,000 sensors and 15,000 cameras have been installed in this territory twice the size of Monaco.
This battery of sensors is not the property of Siemens. The German company, which competes with the digital giants for the world market of the connected city, the one called smart city, data city, or safe city, it depends, on the other hand directs the control tower. The manufacturer saw Expo 2020 as a unique opportunity to test, on the scale of an average city, the MindSphere, its in-house digital platform capable of interacting with any other system, of analyzing data and thus to manage the major urban functions: networks, infrastructures or security. The life of 137 buildings, the entrances and exits of the district, those of its innumerable car parks were scrutinized with a magnifying glass.
Zero carbon city
The show stopped at the end of March, but the sensors and the control tower did not stop transmitting. The technology, already tested in Aspern, in the suburbs of Vienna, in Austria, must be deployed in the district which is to succeed the Universal Exhibition, and which will therefore continue to serve as a demonstrator. Istanbul, Turkey has already expressed interest. And if Neom, the futuristic city worth 500 billion dollars (475 billion euros) imagined by Mohammed Ben Salman Al Saud (known as “MBS”), the Saudi crown prince, comes out of the sands one day, the Germans hope to be there their entries.
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