Jeff Connolly, Chairman and CEO of Siemens Australia & Pacific

What could Melbourne look like if we embrace the full range of digital technologies currently and readily available? This is a question we should and can ask ourselves now amid COVID-19. With adversity comes opportunity. With change comes a time to rethink - and perhaps reset - what we want our great city to look like.

Adaptability is the game changer for city infrastructure. The interconnectedness of people and infrastructure has never been more apparent than during COVID-19. The city ecosystem needs to keep a harmonious relationship between competing but complementary areas such as businesses, utilities, planners, governments and communities. To do this, infrastructure needs to be smart, and we, the Melburnians, need to view things holistically.

In this way can we achieve greater resilience, address climate challenges, tackle issues that come with an aging population, better allocate scarce resources, provide a safe environment and create a city of the future that maintains its great reputation for liveability by evolving to be more human-centric.

Imagine a place designed around human needs: integration of emergency services, less congestion, the capability to rapidly respond and adapt to changing situations such as a pandemic, a flood, a heatwave and more. Yes, it is possible, and as we’ve seen with COVID-19, the investment would pay for itself in spades - after all, COVID-19 has cost our economy billions of dollars.

Cities around the world are grappling with the same challenges. From a technology viewpoint, Melbourne could create a “digital twin” of the city so that we can test and simulate scenarios like a pandemic or natural disaster. Digital twins are used now by leading manufacturers so they can design, build and test something before making large investments. In this way they can iron out the bugs, change the variables, remove inefficiencies and test different scenarios – all in a digital world – to ensure the best investment and best outcome. This is how the Mars Rover was created and successfully developed. The same can be done with a city – from buildings to transport and energy and water.

Through quality data we can create cities that balance environmental impact and economic growth. Imagine being able to eliminate waste, save energy and reduce costs.

Take electric cars for example. If Melbourne said it wanted to have 100 per cent electric cars by 2050, then Melbourne might need to add over 100 new charging stations per week every week until 2050. Then add electricity generation capacity, just to service the additional load. Where do you put the charging stations and additional infrastructure? How do we plan for the additional energy generation capacity? It’s all critical data for city planners, government departments and utilities.

Smart Infrastructure intelligently connects energy systems, buildings and industries, enhancing the way we live and work to significantly improve efficiency and sustainability. We’re seeing great examples of this in Melbourne already at the MCG, Museums Victoria, and even RMIT. Buildings and the energy system are starting to merge. Technology upgrades to these sites have resulted in substantial reductions in energy and water consumption– good for the bottom line and good for the environment. For an important venue like Museums Victoria they’re able to preserve and protect our history and important artifacts for future generations – so the implications are also societal.

However, at Siemens we estimate that as much as 99% of the world’s buildings aren’t yet smart. This means brick and steel infrastructure or, at most, semi-automated infrastructure, like electric railways with basic automation.

The result of not being smart is that city buildings consume about 40% of the world’s energy! This directly translates to CO2 emissions. In our view, the biggest impact we can have on climate abatement is through reducing energy consumption. Through currently available technology we can reduce the demand for energy from our buildings by as much as 40%. Countries like Japan were forced down that path after they shut down their 54 nuclear reactors between 2010 and 2012. The single biggest source of replacement for this loss of energy was energy efficiency measures.

Our capacity to leverage data to the advantage of people in cities is still in its infancy. In the future, we envision smart infrastructure becoming all-sensing; an ecosystem that knows you and adapts to your needs.

Existing digitalisation technologies, including sensors, allow a city to better cope with new inputs to its environment – such as a pandemic. The ultimate goal is to have ‘fully integrated intelligent infrastructure’ whereby each type of infrastructure is not only smart in its own right but it is also communicating with other infrastructure and people. If you’re a Melburnian, you’ll be familiar with the regular story of a truck getting stuck under a certain bridge in South Melbourne. If the bridge, the railway, the road and the truck were talking to each other, this wouldn’t happen. This is a simplistic example; the benefits are much greater.

We can achieve greater efficiencies by networking systems and pooling resources. We can respond in real-time and we can predict outcomes and take pre-emptive actions.

In this future, command and control centers will integrate transport, water, gas, and electricity networks to react quickly in a crisis - optimising traffic signals to facilitate emergency services or evacuation routes, cutting gas in the event of a fire, or diverting power to critical infrastructure like hospitals when power supply has been compromised.

Through a digital, adaptable twin of a city, we can test and simulate a city’s resilience to events like natural disasters and pandemics. This helps us understand how adaptable the city is to such events and simulate appropriate responses.

Today, through our subsidiary Enlighted, “Internet of Things” (IoT) smart sensors collect and monitor real-time occupancy, light levels, temperatures and energy use. They can distinguish between people and objects, and customise controls for specific purposes. We already have this technology operating in our Siemens head office in Melbourne. And we already have 3.5 million sensors installed across our customers’ buildings globally. These sensors help them make the best use of their office space and cut energy costs. In the UK, this system enables the National Health Service outpatient facility to cut energy spend by 80% annually.

The pandemic is a challenge nobody wants to face, but perhaps through this adversity, we can learn. Perhaps we can ensure that Melbourne continues to be great – as long as we rapidly embrace technology and adapt our city infrastructure.

This opinion paper is part of the City of the Future event 2, exploring focus are 4: Data and Ethics.

Problem statement: How might we accelerate our digital infrastructure while maintaining ethics and privacy?