Coral Gables Resilient Smart Districts

QUALITY OF LIFE, INNOVATION & ECONOMIC GROWTH

BY RAIMUNDO RODULFO

Coral Gables’ smart districts pivot on a robust and resilient cyber-infrastructure to continually improve quality of life and foster innovation and growth.

The City of Coral Gables is in the center of Miami-Dade County. We are home to the University of Miami, over 140 multinational corporations, and more than 20 international trade offices and consulates. About six years ago, we started a smart city program, accelerating our building of infrastructure that has multiple functions and capacities.

Coral Gables builds on a solid foundation of high-speed communications that provides digital inclusion and a layer of cyber-physical systems with AI-powered smart city poles and IoT sensors. This foundation is resilient with fault tolerance and failover automation to keep critical services available during hurricanes, power outages, and other disasters. The city’s urban infrastructure provides hyperconnectivity, visibility, automation, and capacity that enhances public safety, mobility, education, collaboration, business development, and comprehensive city services.

As Coral Gables’ smart districts continue evolving with the expansion of fiber corridors, new cyber-infrastructure projects, and urban analytics, the city can augment its business capabilities, delivering resilient citizen services, connectivity, real-time actionable insight, and an entrepreneurship ecosystem that creates jobs and opportunities for our region.

In the Emergency Operations Center (EOC), we bring together stakeholders from every function and department, and we leverage the data from various sensors, like traffic sensors, water canals that detect flooding, and environmental sensors like air quality, wind speed, wind chill, and rainfall. Multiple data gives us high visibility for emergency management, urban planning, and public safety. All those systems are aggregated in the Smart City Hub in the Public Safety Headquarter Building.

We bring this technology together at the EOC, including GIS systems, maps that allow us to collect data from the rescue recon from the rain, and drones that give us visibility over areas we don’t normally access. We also bring data from the stakeholders in that connected mobile fleet to provide insight into emergency and normal operations. It starts with a vision of Industry 4.0 technologies to improve quality of life; foster innovation, citizen engagement, and economic growth; and leverage the infrastructure and technology; and integrate all those systems together.

We then talk about how we can leverage those focus areas to deliver quick wins that make a difference for our residents, like lowering traffic accidents and crime and improving public transportation and services with efficiencies, higher accessibility, and digital inclusion. Those quick wins deliver immediate results that make a difference in quality of life.

When we started talking about smart cities, we started building a resilient network and telecommunications throughout the city. We built that infrastructure to provide business continuity, economic growth, entrepreneurship, and innovation.

Horizontal integration is part of this strategy, ensuring we have interoperability between systems and data for better business intelligence and best-practices frameworks so we can deliver results on time, on budget, and on scope. Collaboration with industry and academia is key and allows us to deliver better results and augment capacity.

In Smart District A, we have the highest concentration of smart city infrastructure— fiber corridors, wireless mesh networks, wireless point-to-point networks, public Wi-Fi, and smart city sensors—to provide insight for sustainability. Those districts keep expanding, enhancing those capabilities to other areas of the city. For example, adjacent to U.S. 1 and the University of Miami, we are building fiber corridors that will allow us to continue expanding capacity besides what we already built in the geofence of the city.

We have a second phase of that collaboration to design and build smart microgrids with higher resiliency that can leverage not only the traditional microgenerators but also solar and wind power and other renewables.

We get high visibility from the traffic, pedestrian, and bicycle sensors; environmental sensors like water waves and others we did in collaboration with Florida International University; safety sensors; and behavioral analytics using computer vision, AI, and machine learning to classify objects or multimodal transportation objects to detect, classify, analyze, and visualize those objects in real time—and also to predict how those variables will behave in the future.

We also have sensors for noise, air quality, parking, and lighting throughout the central business districts. Digital kiosks provide data

Coral Gables, Florida

©EKIN

Smart Streetlight

The first of its kind in the U.S., the Ekin Smart City Pole aggregates and integrates more than 10 technologies, including environmental and traffic sensors, edge analytics, computer vision, and machine learning analytics with 5G telecommunications and a hot spot for machine networks and public Wi-Fi. and interact with the public. We bring that information to the Community Intelligence Center and visualize that data to the public on the Smart City Hub.

We also have drone technology for emergency operations or rescue recon to inspect areas where we have fallen trees or accessibility issues or to inspect water damage in rooftops or telecommunication towers.

During a crowded event on Miracle Mile, there was a missing child. Our analysts used this computer vision system with AI and morphological analysis and found the child in just two minutes.

We built this infrastructure to be resilient in a Category 5 building. We also have network resiliency to connect to these services even if we lose communication channels. We also have network resilience in the sense that we have a secondary data center in another Category 5 facility for disaster recovery.

We have real-time data application. We leverage hyper-converged infrastructure to have that architecture in our stack and our systems for data storage, backups, and servers that are resilient not only to the co-location facility but also to the cloud.

We have received a lot of awards, including an award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for the resilience of our network during Hurricane Irma, where our city had more than 80% power down after the storm, and we were able to keep critical services and service responders intact.

Raimundo Rodulfo

Chief Innovation Officer, City of Coral Gables

Coral Gables, Florida

Raimundo Rodulfo is an engineering and technology leader with over 27 years of experience delivering value, sustainability, and innovation to customers and organizations. He and his team at the City of Coral Gables IT Department work with city leadership and departments as a strategic partner, bringing value, efficiencies, innovation, and process improvements through technology solutions and smart city initiatives.