URBAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYTICS IN A DIGITAL TWIN ENVIRONMENT

BY RAIMUNDO RODULFO

How has the City of Coral Gables’ homegrown digital twin platforms pivoted on hyperconnectivity, hyper-automation, and interoperability of urban and environmental IoT systems and smart city infrastructure to inform resilience strategies?

Coral Gables has embraced the smart city movement with a focus on sustainability, resiliency, quality of life, economic growth, and innovation. The city was founded by George Merrick, an urban planning visionary who had a holistic view of building a planned community inspired by the Garden City movement, the City Beautiful movement, and the MediterraneanRevival architectural features of European cities. Merrick’s vision of top-of-the-line municipal services also included education, innovation, and economic opportunities. In 1926, when he founded the city, he also created the Coral Gables Chamber of Commerce and the University of Miami.

The city is centrally located in Miami-Dade County. Millions of vehicles traverse the city monthly. More than 150 multinational regional and corporate headquarters and more than 20 international consulates and trade offices call Coral Gables home. Our smart city programs have a regional impact on quality of life and public safety.

In 2004, I had the privilege of joining the city after 10 years of working as an electrical engineer in the telecommunications industry. Since then, I’ve been able to help Coral Gables build an innovation and technology team as well as a smart city infrastructure. We built this infrastructure from the ground up, and through technology, look to improve the quality of life for our residents while fostering innovation and economic growth in our region.

Coral Gables has developed multiple smart districts to improve the quality of life in areas like public safety, mobility, digital inclusion, and public health. These districts are designed with fiber-optic corridors, a wireless backbone, a metropolitan ethernet backup from the industry, and public Wi-Fi networks. Free public Wi-Fi backhauled by underground fiber plays an important role in providing community resiliency after a natural disaster, such as a hurricane. The city also uses satellite networks from multiple service providers to provide critical capacity for first responders. These smart districts are built on a robust network foundation with hyper-automation and hyperconnectivity and resilient broadband communications that provide high-speed capacity for all the citizen services that sustain what is called a smart city.

The city has an Emergency Operation Center (EOC) where it applies technology to crisis response. The EOC is a regional center for analytics and regional response.

Additionally, the city’s sustainability and resiliency initiatives include conservation, carbon reduction, and community engagement. For example, the city has the largest municipal electric vehicle fleet in the state with some 70 vehicles or 12% of its fleet. The city also works with alternative transportation and mobility methodologies and has a green building program. The city is a LEED Gold-certified community and has enacted legislation to promote green businesses. It has a climate change and sea-level rise mitigation fund, a robust waste management and recycling program, including electronic and pharmaceutical drug recycling, and many initiatives such as a reverse vending machine.

Coral Gables has built a network of Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems that include smart lighting controllers and smart poles throughout the city, traffic and parking sensors, CCTV and ALPR cameras, interactive digital kiosks, environmental sensors like air and water quality sensors, and traffic analytics coming from multimodal traffic and bringing visibility also from the connected vehicle fleet. The city uses AI to manage the millions of data points from all those devices and systems to derive actionable insights for decision-makers, traffic engineers, and urban planners.

One of the latest technologies implemented in Coral Gables is a modular AI-powered smart city pole, developed by aerospace engineers and improved by the city’s structural engineers to make it resistant to hurricane winds. The pole has a modular design that allows different modules to be plugged and played without the need for construction or external attachments, and its industrial design is inspired by the city’s architectural character. This ecosystem of intelligent systems and devices collects and analyzes data from all city domains, including asset management facilities, land management, financials, community recreation public safety, IoT, smart parking facilities, and external data from universities and STEM partners. The upper layer of the Coral Gables smart city engineering framework includes the city’s smart city hub open-data platforms, digital twins, and transparency portals that allow the city to communicate with its citizens and provide digital value to a smart city ecosystem that is people-centric but also has businesses and organizations in health care, education, universities, and schools.

The architecture behind the city’s digital twin is a smart city enterprise systems interoperability and horizontal integration model, which allows for data governance, security, best practices, integration, and connectivity. It fosters real-time collaboration and connects the dots between the city’s enterprise systems and data domains to improve operational efficiencies and citizen access to services. It also provides spatial computing tools that expedite analyses and information sharing between stakeholders and provides a smart city open-data platform gateway to Web3 and decentralized immersive experience environments.

The city’s smart city initiative has allowed Coral Gables to become an experimental city. We work with leading research institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), UC Berkeley, National Labs, the University of Miami, and Florida International University. This approach has enabled the city to explore alternative solutions, take risks, and create new technologies to improve the quality of life for its residents and visitors.

As Coral Gables continues to build upon hyper-automation and hyperconnectivity to improve quality-of-life programs, we are working to extend our broadband corridors throughout the city with the goal of creating a research and innovation triangle.

The Underline, a linear park below the rapid transit corridor is being developed and can leverage infrastructure for resiliency, public safety, collaboration, digital literacy, and inclusion.

I believe that by working with our partners in government, industry, academia, and community organizations, we can make the smart city ecosystem a regional thing for the entire county and more. We can create incubators, accelerators, and training and upskilling centers to get young people interested in and empowered by these technologies. I see a need to connect the dots and provide last-mile connectivity for this region, for all our communities to collaborate and back each other up. Imagine the possibilities.

Raimundo Rodulfo is an engineering and technology leader with over 30 years of experience delivering value, sustainability, and innovation to customers and organizations. As chief innovation officer, 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.