A comprehensive Smart City approach leads to a transformation in the organization of local authorities
The term Smart City, translated as "intelligent city" in French, is a concept that emerged in the early 2010s. It proposes to bring a digital dimension to the term sustainable city: digital technology is seen here as a tool for improving urban life, and not as an end in itself, but it still brings a real technological, organizational, and even human impact to the city.
Thus, even if Smart Cities are often initially very focused on a technological aspect, the local authorities that are the project owners are very quickly caught up in the organizational aspect of such approaches. Indeed, by modernizing tools, processes, and professions, a Smart City project amounts to a profound reorganization of the way a city or metropolitan area traditionally operates.
As such, the digital transformation of the community involved in the modernization of its infrastructure and business processes often constitutes the most complex aspect of the deployment of this type of project. This is why, in recent years, new software tools and new functional modules for city management have emerged: urban hypervisors.
Concretely, what is an urban hypervisor?
A hypervisor is a software module for the centralized organization of all or part of the city.
The concept of hypervision historically comes from the world of Information Systems. In this case, the concept of hypervision is the centralization of monitoring tools, applications, and repository within a single aggregator tool. In the IT world, a hypervisor is therefore software that allows automated, fluid, and cross-functional management of an IT infrastructure, which greatly simplifies its administration.
Urban hypervision is therefore simply an application of this concept to city governance. The urban hypervisor's function is to centralize all of a city's monitoring tools, applications, repositories, and data. Indeed, the digital transformation of local authorities is leading to a proliferation of business tools and a proliferation of urban sensors and data. Added to this is the segmentation of each tool for a given business, which reinforces the silo effect that exists within cities and inter-municipal authorities.
The implementation of an urban hypervisor aims to centralize information and create connections between business lines by creating a single cross-functional management interface. Thus, the main functions of an urban hypervisor are as follows:
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- Operate and monitor the territory, by encapsulating existing business supervisors within a single interface. This includes the ability to view all of the city's infrastructure via a single interface.
- Collect and centralize data, particularly by enabling IoT devices in cities and buildings to deposit data into a central database;
- Aggregate, share, and manage this data by centralizing all repositories and defining a common data processing standard;
- Act remotely on infrastructure, whether through actions directed at connected devices (control/command), the implementation of scenarios and rules, or simply by facilitating the coordination of response teams;
In technical terms, such a module helps manage the complexity induced by the diversity of city professions
City management involves an unparalleled diversity of professions, from public lighting to security, including water networks and social and cultural activities. In total, no fewer than 30 different professions coexist within a single community, and each profession potentially involves different tools, processes, skills, and sectors.
Historically, the city has managed this complexity by implementing a highly hierarchical pyramidal organization focused on the efficiency of each profession. However, in the digital age and its new capabilities for information flow, automation, and innovation, this organization faces structural challenges:
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- A structure that does not facilitate the digital transformation of businesses and teams. With management prioritizing business efficiency, the cross-functional project and transformation culture is still very weak within local authorities.
- A service gap compared to other entities. Thus, while postal, commercial, financial, and government services are now fully digitalized and offer services that meet current standards (online information, remote actions, information transparency, real-time monitoring, customer relationship tracking), local authorities are significantly behind. This is especially true when the size of the community is small.
- An increase in silos and a structural risk of a "multi-speed city". Today, the modernization of a profession is often carried out at the initiative of its management and without consultation with the rest of the urban professions. Thus, the situation of professional silos with incompatible tools and frameworks is a real risk. We can also observe a real disconnection of certain professions on digital issues, with part of the city still working on "graphite paper" systems while some professions are digitally equipped.
All this complexity, linked to the nature of a city's organization and the existing systems accumulated over the past fifty years, represents a challenge for the city's digital transformation ambitions.
Urban hypervisors are designed to address this complexity and facilitate the city's modernization. The goal is to build an information system foundation that concentrates information and automatically manages the relationships between the tools of the various business lines, leaving only strategic decisions to the city and avoiding wasting time and energy on technical complexity.
In organizational terms, a hypervisor often involves a reorganization of the city, moving toward a centralized city command center
The implementation of a tool of this type implies the creation of a new function within the city: supervision and overall control/command. Thus, the deployment of a hypervisor is necessarily a cross-functional project that concerns both the organization of Human Resources and the technical management of the businesses. This type of project leads the community to project itself into a new organization, to take into account the following points:
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- How can new functions and services be integrated within the community? Most of the new positions and services will focus on job supervision and the creation of a cross-functional approach.
- Implementing a hypervisor involves a form of de facto sharing between certain positions and job functions that are currently managed separately. Thus, implementing an intervention monitoring component could lead to the sharing of certain processes and tools between certain departments, such as urban cleanliness and roads.
- Manage the transformation of the community's tools, processes, and operations. To implement the new tools enabled by urban hypervisor, it is necessary to define a transformation, training, and change management plan.
Example of integrating hypervision modules into city management
Example of OnDijon: deployment of a customized solution
At the end of 2017, the Greater Dijon metropolitan area signed a 12-year contract for the design, construction, operation, and maintenance of a centralized command center (CCP) that will bring together, in a single location, the supervision of around ten urban functions related to security (street lighting, video surveillance, building security, mobility and traveler information, operation of traffic light intersections, smart parking, electronic information, vehicle fleet tracking).
As part of this project, the city commissioned a consortium (Bouygues Energie et Services, Capgemini, Suez, and Citelum) to modernize its entire infrastructure (renewal, installation of sensors) and to design and deploy a hypervision module to manage all functions related to the administration of the city's space from a single location and interface.
The PCC has been operational since April 2019. It allows supervisors of each function to carry out their missions and includes a central hypervision module that provides complex crisis scenario planning functions (stadium exits, priority passage of an ambulance) by combining several functions: coordinated management, for example, video surveillance, traffic light intersections, and public street lamps. The project led to the design and deployment of a dedicated Technical Information System, including a data warehouse with advanced big data analytics functions. Its aim is to enable better management of urban equipment and services.
Dijon Métropole has chosen to conduct this project through a Global Performance Market (GPM), listing specific performance objectives that the group must achieve in the future: achieving significant savings (reduced consumption, fewer maintenance operations, etc.), improving the efficiency of public services, promoting seamless and transparent information, and developing a cross-sector culture within the community.
Angers Smart City Use Case: A Building Block Deployed Based on Engie's LIVIN Solution
Angers Métropole has selected a consortium of four partners (Engie, Suez, La Poste, and Vyv) to deploy a hypervisor across the entire metropolitan area.
The group, led by Engie, will equip the city with new sensors and install a hypervisor, an IT tool bringing together data flows from 9 different sectors (lighting, water, waste, watering, parking, mobility, health, consumption of public buildings and video surveillance).
Engie will handle public lighting, video surveillance, and the hypervision platform. Suez will manage water, irrigation, and waste. La Poste (via its subsidiary Docaposte) will handle data storage and will also address last-mile logistics issues that have not yet been determined. Finally, the VYV mutual insurance company will provide citizens with a data management platform for health prevention (air pollution, heat islands, etc.).
Like Dijon, the Angers project is subject to a Global Performance Contract, representing a €121 million investment over 12 years. The performance targets set in the contract should generate €101 million in cumulative savings over the project's amortization period (25 years), with penalties for Engie if the announced performance is not achieved.
As part of the contract, approximately 50,000 sensors will be installed in the Angers metropolitan area, while 30,000 streetlights will be converted to LEDs. 10,000 masts and 5,000 electrical cabinets will also be connected to enable more precise control of certain streetlights or at the neighborhood level. The objective is to reduce energy consumption in public lighting by 66% (that's €3 to €4 million per year), energy consumption in buildings by 20%, and water consumption by 30%.
Construction began in March 2020, and a first version of the hypervisor has been implemented.
More broadly, a wide variety of players are now positioned on this type of tool.
In France, the concept of hypervision has developed sector by sector, particularly through the evolution of business monitoring solutions (street lighting, security, water network, etc.) towards more comprehensive mechanisms.
As such, there is a thriving ecosystem positioned on this type of solution. However, two approaches seem to be emerging:
A "broad spectrum" profile, which aims to provide a single solution for hypervising all city functions. Coming from the energy (Engie, Citelum), urban services (Suez), or construction (Eifface, Citeos, a Vinci subsidiary), representatives of the "broad spectrum" have developed top-down hypervision solutions (Engie) or based on CMMS/supervisors well-established in their market sector (Citelum, Citeos, Suez). These companies also offer a wide range of business applications and are diversifying their offerings.
A "specialized" profile, whose ambition is to hypervise all tools across one or more business verticals. Coming from construction, industry, and/or infrastructure management, these companies offer building-centric solutions (BIM solutions). They often integrate, in a complementary manner, components related to urban protection, such as video surveillance (Spie, Actemium).
It should be noted that Hypervision-type solutions are also being targeted internationally, notably by major digital companies such as Google, Cisco, Amazon, and Alibaba.
The main feature of the urban hypervision market in France today is an imbalance between supply and demand. Currently, a large number of industrial organizations are positioning themselves and developing solutions, while few local authorities have yet succeeded in completing large-scale projects. The origin of this imbalance appears to lie more in a differential in the pace of investment between public (slower) and private (faster) players than in a lack of demand.
The rise of the urban hypervision concept: the beginnings of the emergence of a French-style smart city model?
The French ecosystem stands out internationally thanks to a multi-disciplinary approach provided by leaders in urban management
France stands out for its competitive urban management sector, based on a long tradition of network administration through Public Service Delegation (PSD). As such, the French ecosystem is particularly dense and driven by leaders structuring their sectors: Veolia, Bouygues, Suez, Vinci, Engie, EDF, etc.
Thus, in France, Smart City initiatives are structured around major private urban players rather than the information technology ecosystem. This specificity is reflected in the way large-scale programs are designed and implemented:
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- Investments focused on network modernization
- The construction of a centralized Control Center to enable cross-functional management of these networks and public spaces. These Control Centers already exist for the supervision of strategic infrastructures (electricity and water), which are the specialty of French industrial leaders (Veolia, Suez, Engie, EDF, etc.)
- The conceptualization and deployment of hypervision modules, allowing for a simplified cross-functional vision of the city and easier execution of crisis scenarios. Once again, this central role of the concept of urban hypervision can be explained by the strong presence of companies that have long applied this type of method in strategic business areas (water, sanitation, electricity, security).
In this respect, the French ecosystem has significant assets, and the similar typology of projects in Dijon and Angers could foreshadow a promising model, including in international competition.
The conceptualization of the notion of Hypervision and the resulting public/private model is a French specificity at this stage.
While it is still too early to speak of a Smart City model in France, it is interesting to compare flagship projects in France with what is happening internationally:
In Asia, the surveillance and security component of cities appears to be the major factor in most projects. The focus is primarily on video surveillance and transportation. This model is often supported by the central government and applied to large urban areas (Singapore, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, etc.). The companies involved are mainly from the telecommunications sector (Huawei, Samsung, etc.).
In North America, the Smart City approach often results from a desire by public authorities to delegate all or part of the management of their responsibilities within a geographic area. As such, they are often encouraged to do so by private companies seeking to unlock new markets.
Thus, Smart City PPPs (public-private partnerships) are part of a genuine national policy to support transportation and accelerate Smart Building initiatives. This model often leaves it up to private stakeholders to maximize the profitability of their investments, which limits the scope of application to the most profitable urban areas (planning, transportation, networks).
Thus, the hypervisor model emerging in France could now serve as a competing model. There are similarities between this type of project and a specific French positioning:
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- The choice of a public/private partnership based on Global Performance Contracts, which establishes the community's independence and autonomy from private stakeholders. The basis of the contract lies more in the achievement of objectives and results than in the delegation of its powers.
- Local political leadership, with a decentralized model, which appears independent of the State.
- Concrete service objectives for citizens, while respecting the principles of the GDPR.
- An approach focused on improving the overall management of the City, often driven by City stakeholders (operators, integrators) rather than by new entrants from the information technology sector.
Nicolas Potier
Contact Nicolas Potier
Do you have a question about urban hypervision? Need some clarification regarding a future project? Send an email to Nicolas Potier, Associate Director at Tactis.
