Wang Peng is a senior expert of Tencent Research Institute
Abstract:Urban digital transformation is an important development direction during the 14th Five-Year Plan period in mainland China. This paper analyzes from the perspective of the first principle of the city, and believes that the essence of the city is to solve people's growing demand through the centralized supply of facilities and services. On this basis, several trends at the technical approach level of urban digital transformation are proposed, including: superficial demand, deep solution, fragmentation demand, systematic solution, operation end demand, and market-oriented solution.
The First Principles of the City
In the Proposal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Formulating the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development and the Long-term Goals for the Year 2035, it is clearly stated that it is necessary to "accelerate digital development", to "develop the digital economy, promote digital industrialization and industrial digitalization, and promote the deep integration of the digital economy and the real economy", and to "strengthen the construction of digital society and digital government, and improve the level of digital intelligence such as public services and social governance". Since then, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Beijing and other cities have put forward the goal of urban digital transformation.
For the digital transformation of cities, Shanghai also particularly emphasized that this is a "revolutionary reshaping", not a simple iteration of technical means, but driven by the in-depth application of big data, forcing profound changes in urban management methods, models and concepts, leading the comprehensive innovation of production and lifestyle and thinking mode. (Opinions on Comprehensively Promoting the Digital Transformation of Shanghai City)
But what is the difference between the digital transformation of this city, or the subversive innovation of smart city, and the progressive innovation of digital city, smart city, government informatization, and digital government on the existing administrative and governance system in the past? To put it simply, from the digitization of a single system to the deep integration of the entire urban system, from system construction to sustainable operation, from government-led to market-oriented multi-subject participation, etc. are all important trends. And from this, what is the first principle, or essence, of cities and their digital transformation?
First-principles thinking was first proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle: "There is a first-principles in every systematic exploration." First principles are basic propositions and assumptions that cannot be omitted, deleted, or violated. ”[1]
Some scholars believe that "the essence of the city is a tool for a certain number of people to gather and interact into a large-scale semi-complete social organization under certain spatio-temporal conditions, and to solve the scarcity of resources by improving the scale or efficiency of allocating resources." [2] In other words, it can be argued that "the essence of the city is to solve people's growing demand through the centralized supply of facilities and services." "If in the industrial age we meet the growth of demand by inventing and producing more products and creating more urban space (but resources are limited, and we cannot sustain this growth forever), then in the information age, we need to connect the supply and demand sides more efficiently through data and computing, achieve more accurate matching, and make the limited stock resources more efficient." [3]
"Informatization is through the efficient circulation of information, reducing the cost of trust and internal friction in the organization, and achieving the purpose of decreasing marginal cost." The reduction of marginal costs of infrastructure and public services is the fundamental driving force for urban agglomeration, and there is bound to be an inherent demand for informatization. With the comprehensive digital transformation of urban planning, construction, operation and management, cities have the ability to adjust their operating conditions more and more frequently and even in real time. The planning, operation and service links of the city are becoming more and more inseparable, and gradually integrated. ”[4]
Several trends in the digital transformation of cities
Under the influence of the "computing-connecting" capabilities of information technology, the urban spatial system, transportation system, and energy system will gradually be transformed from a completely heterogeneous system into a new system based on a unified supply and demand matching logic. Urban physical space and land use patterns tend to be stable, but data-driven, "flow" characteristics of matter and energy exchange will become increasingly complex. Urban digital transformation will emerge with new problem-oriented ways of thinking in various fields. Guided by this way of thinking, its technical approach will have the following trends.
1 / Surface demand, deep solution
The industry "pain points" we have obtained in the research on information demand are often difficult to overcome in reality, but these "pain points" are actually embedded in traditional working methods and organizational processes. If the entire process is truly recreated at a deep level with new technologies, the superficial "pain points" may no longer exist.
For example, after the emergence of shared bicycles, a large number of disorderly delivery and management deficiencies caused by street congestion and safety hazards, at this time, many local governments proposed a solution is to require fixed-point parking, and even learn to set up parking piles for traditional public bicycles, which completely eliminates the advantages of precise positioning and low operating costs brought about by the hardware innovation of shared bicycles, which is tantamount to cutting enough. So we and Mobike developed the first shared bicycle big data operation platform "Rubik's Cube", through the analysis of massive bicycle location and trajectory data, timely discover the problem of time-space distribution of bicycles and optimize operational efficiency. The government version of "Rubik's Cube" can access the data of multiple shared bicycle operators at the same time, becoming a government supervision platform, and the intelligent spatio-temporal algorithm can timely discover problems such as over-delivery and insufficient operation and maintenance. For bicycle operators who do not have accurate positioning capabilities, we have also developed a set of RF positioning products, which can force the remote collection of Bluetooth smart lock data of almost all brands of shared bicycles by installing small positioning base stations in key parts of the city. If each bicycle can be equipped with a uniform and extremely low-cost electronic tag as required, then the bicycle operation of the entire city can be precisely controlled.
Another example is that a district commerce bureau in the epidemic due to a large number of business closures and other issues, the 12345 hotline related complaints increased significantly, the original municipal platform complaint work orders need to be printed and distributed step by step, manual dispatch, telephone communication, but also manually sort out work forms and work records, the workload is extremely large, so the need to build an online dispatch system was put forward. The basic function is to obtain the complaint business documents of the municipal platform through the interface, and then the office staff designates the responsible person based on the WeChat Mini Program to handle it, and leaders at all levels can supervise and approve online. Such a function is not difficult to achieve, but after our research, we believe that only based on the existing dispatch process to online approval, but only to achieve the realization of mobile phone processing at any time, and can be paperless operation, but the actual efficiency of the improvement is limited. After deeply decomposing the requirements, we believe that in addition to online migration, the manual dispatch link can be intelligently transformed through AI as a whole. We use NLP (natural language processing) and machine learning and other technologies to process complaint information by word segmentation, and train and classify corpus through supervised learning, which can automatically classify complaints according to experience according to keywords, and then realize automatic dispatch. After a period of training and debugging, the effect of fully automatic and accurate dispatch has been basically realized, and more than half of the workload has been saved overall. In this way, not only the need to migrate from offline dispatch to online is realized, but also the higher goal of automatic dispatch is achieved.
After the emergence of technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the Internet of Things, compared with the simple digital transformation model based on the Internet and mobile Internet in the past, some traditional links that rely on manual operation can be more deeply transformed, and through deep process reengineering, truly improve quality and efficiency. In the above two cases, they are based on the first principle of "supply and demand matching" in smart cities, and exert the value of "computing" and "connection" to solve fundamental problems, rather than simply applying traditional management methods and providing only simple information processes.
2 / Fragmentation requirements, systematic solution
The first pain point in the field of smart cities, or digital government, has always been "data islands", based on the barriers of information systems isolated by vertical industry departments. After the continuous evolution and expansion of business systems in various industries, "islands" become "chimneys" and then "bunkers". If we only build applications from the perspective of the "fragmented" needs raised by various departments, this trend can only be exacerbated. At this time, it is necessary to be under the guidance of the top-level design, standing at the height of the urban system, the overall overall planning of data collection, application, sharing and opening up and other aspects, in addition to the usual emphasis on the government's internal cross-departmental data access, how to achieve sufficient information communication between the government, enterprises and citizens through information means, to achieve multi-party collaboration, is the key to solving many problems.
Taking the city's perception system as an example, in the construction of smart cities led by vertical departments in the past, each department built a IoT perception system, such as cameras, sensors, etc., from the end equipment to the installation carrier, and then to the power and network access, which required repeated investment. In the system construction needs proposed by each department, only the business of their own departments will be considered, which will inevitably lead to a large number of duplicate construction, and it is also necessary to re-aggregate and integrate various data after decentralized construction. In recent years, the wide application of smart light poles has solved the problem of sharing various roadside terminal installation carriers and power and network access capabilities to a certain extent, which can make street lamps, signs, 5G base stations, cameras, radars, edge computing nodes and various roadside sensors common pole installation. However, further integrating various cameras installed in multiple departments, centralizing the design and overall installation of various sensors, and establishing an integrated urban perception network as a common foundation for all smart city systems requires deeper top-level design thinking and political wisdom.
The CIM urban information model is a popular concept in recent years. It has been generally agreed that CIM integrates system capabilities such as GIS, BIM, and IOT, which can be used as a common digital base for smart cities, and is also a key technology for systematically solving data aggregation and application problems. However, in practice, CIM is still often simply understood as a visual tool for spatial data, and only focuses on promotion and application in the field of space construction such as construction and management. In fact, the fundamental task of smart cities is to match the supply and demand of spatio-temporal resources, and CIM is a platform centered on spatio-temporal data and algorithms, aggregating data and performing spatio-temporal computing, especially high-frequency algorithm matching, which should have become the core platform for systematic coordination and application of urban data.
At present, the big data bureaus and other institutions established at all levels of government have their starting points to jump out of the shackles of departmental informatization construction and comprehensively coordinate data resources. In addition to the construction of common perception/computing hardware, the opening up of data resources and the overall planning of comprehensive applications, the real top-level design and system thinking that runs through planning, construction, operation and management are very important. Data is the basis for describing demand and supply and achieving "supply and demand matching" of resources. The integration and coordination of this data is also the concrete embodiment of systematic thinking.
3 / Operation-side demand, market-oriented solution
An important capability of informatization is to reduce the cost of meeting the long-tail market demand. Under the role of information technology, many urban infrastructure and service systems that were originally invested or subsidized by the government can operate independently at a very low cost, so they can be operated by enterprise entities in a market-oriented manner. From the perspective of first principles, that is, through computing and connectivity capabilities, dynamic requirements and facilities and services are automatically and efficiently matched. The role of government shifts to data-based regulation and rule-making.
Before the advent of shared bicycles, the operation of urban public bicycles required heavy subsidies from the government. After the emergence of shared bicycles, after years of development, they have gradually matured and standardized. By 2021, the average daily turnover of shared bicycles in Beijing will be close to 2 times, basically achieving breakeven. Districts have gradually withdrawn from public bicycle operations or switched to market-based operations. Although there are still many problems in the shared bicycle industry, once this paradigm of transformation is verified, it can provide reference for many industries.
In addition, taking urban renewal as an example, as urban development enters the stock stage, the improvement and upgrading of existing cities and communities has gradually become the main body of urban construction, and there is undoubtedly a large amount of market space where digital technology can play a role. Due to the huge scale of urban renewal and the transformation of old communities, government investment can only solve a small part of the problem, and more need to rely on market-based models to achieve sustainable operation. In addition to space operation scenarios that are more likely to be concerned, scenarios such as energy conservation, safety and disaster prevention, and community pension in old communities can achieve sustainable operational benefits through the Internet of Things and various sensor technologies. If more deeply combined with spatial design means, a large number of scattered idle spaces in the community can also achieve integrated design, large-scale transformation, automated operation and maintenance, and shared operation through information technology, supplementing the public service system of communities and cities, supplemented by the flexible use of various financial instruments, and achieving overall capital balance and even profitability.
With the deepening and development of smart city construction, governments have realized that they cannot rely on a single input to build, but should pay more attention to sustainable operation. Operation is not a simple IT operation and maintenance, it needs to rely on market-oriented mechanisms to guide enterprises and citizens to participate in urban innovation and truly solve market pain points. Operating is not necessarily a very profitable business model, but it can rely on the value of products and services to make a reasonable fee for sustainable and healthy development.
Summary
In general, based on the first principle of the city, starting from the essence of the "supply and demand matching" of facilities and services through computing and connection in smart cities, it can be seen that the core logic of information technology applied to urban systems is to use various computing and connection technologies to decouple and reconstruct the original systems and processes, so that facilities and services can achieve dynamic and efficient matching of demand and supply, so that limited resources can better meet people's needs. In addition to the decoupling of software and hardware, data and business, application and function of the conventional technical dimensions, multiple levels, multiple links, and multiple subjects in application logic can also be decoupled and reconnected in a more efficient, lower-cost, and fairer way with data as a link. Specific to the operational level, for the "needs" raised by the business side, disruptive and innovative thinking should be introduced, avoiding simple translation and direct response. It is necessary to think deeply about the potential capabilities of digital technologies, explore the transformation of traditional business processes in a "decoupling-refactoring" approach, and create new digital business models.
This article was first published in Future Urban Design and Operation
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