Background
Anyang city, located 25km south of Seoul in the Republic of Korea is developing international recognition on its smart city project that has been implemented incrementally since 2003. Anyang’s smart city initiative began with the bus information system to enhance citizen’s convenience at first, and has been expanding its domain into intelligent transport system (ITS), crime prevention system and disaster prevention system in an integrated manner in the past 12 years. It is now evaluated as a benchmark for smart city where more than 2,200 domestic and international visitors come every year to learn about the benefits and strategies of smart city implementation.
ITS System
With this smart city system in the city’s dedicated smart city center called ‘ubiquitous integrated center’, Anyang city has been providing useful information to citizens such as real-time bus arrival information, traffic congestion and optimum route information as well as maintaining the smooth traffic flow within the city through adaptive signal control. The city has also been experiencing approximately 20% decrease in crime rate per year since the installation of over 3,500 CCTVs and cutting-edge monitoring system, and until now there has been more than 1,300 criminal incidents that got resolved through this system. The implementation cost of such smart city system was total approximately USD 33,000,000 which is practically equivalent to the cost of constructing 1~2km of road. The case of Anyang is a good demonstration of how information communication technology (ICT) can bring large benefits to the sector of public administration with relatively low cost. Anyang city’s current focus is to effectively utilize the big data such as criminal incidents information, CCTV installation locations, education facility locations and resident information database to identify crime prone areas and set special strategies for these areas.
Having Anyang’s successful smart city implementation case as a benchmark, many other cities of Korea are now equipped with various smart city applications such as bus information system, advanced signal control system and crime prevention system. The success factors of Anyang can be identified as the following.
First is the city government officials’ continuous willingness towards service development. The most important success factor of smart city project is the sense of duty of city government officials to provide convenient and safe services to citizens through active utilization of advanced ICT. Anyang could carry on the continuous system integration and development because the city had dedicated professional human resources for smart city implementation only since the development stage of initial bus information system.
Second is the establishment of cooperation system among the smart city-related organizations. Anyang city is reaping synergy effect through the efficient cooperative network system among public agencies such as police, fire department and military agency in terms of information sharing and role allocation in order to secure the convenience and safety of the citizens. This provides an implication that institutional reform is crucial on top of technological reform for the successful implementation of smart city.
Anyang city is continuing its endeavor to expand its smart city services into areas such as waste management and air quality management. It is indeed a recommended case of the Republic of Korea for having integrated system architecture and providing practical smart city services to citizens.