Edinburgh has completed the first phase of its Smart City Operations, a programme aimed at reducing the digital divide among its residents as well as the digitisation and modernisation of its Council services. The city has taken delivery of a Smart City Operations Centre, a product of a partnership between City of Edinburgh Council and CGI, primary provider of end-to-end managed IT services for the Council. Earlier this year, CGI and Edinburgh completed the implementation of Edinburgh Learns for Life, a digital solution to enable equality of access to digital learning in schools and educational establishments across the city.

The deployment to 23 secondary schools, 90 primary schools, 11 special educational schools, and 102 early years centres across the city included more than 44,000 digital devices being handed out to pupils and school staff. All schoolchildren from junior to end of secondary school now have their own devices.

Since 2019, the aim in Edinburgh has been to use smart city technology to make Edinburgh a better place to live, visit and work. To do that, the Council has introduced technologies to help solve the challenges that the city faces. The intention is the ability to better manage public resources, become more sustainable and deliver effective services.

A range of projects are complete or underway that are using smart technologies, including: a smart city operations centre; 11,000 smart waste sensors to provide waste collections analytics; 1,500 smart housing sensors, to provide early detection of needed repairs; an intelligent city infrastructure to manage traffic and air quality; and digital devices for every child in the city.

It has been delivered in partnership with IT service and solutions provider North as part of a £2.6m contract.

Replacing an outdated control centre which was no longer fit-for-purpose, the new smart Operations Centre will receive real-time data from the city’s CCTV network 24/7. This will integrate other technologies which will help to improve traffic flow, transport infrastructure and city planning – subsequently improving the city’s collective carbon footprint. Given the accessibility to real-time data, analytics will drastically help the Council and partners respond to emergencies and manage large-scale events like Edinburgh’s Hogmanay and August Festivals.

Over the last year the council has installed 11,000 smart bin sensors in litter and communal bins throughout the city. The data from the sensors will collect a range of information, such as how full bins are and which bins are used most often. This will allow waste services to respond more quickly and operate more efficient waste collection routes. As a result, this will help the council to save fuel and energy, and make better use of resources.

As part of the council’s commitment to providing warm and healthy homes, the council is trialling humidity, temperature and CO2 sensors in 500 council properties. The sensors, which have just been installed, should allow housing repairs officers to find issues faster and fix them before they impact tenants. This will prove particularly important as the Council actions a damp and improvement plan, to better monitor, communicate and respond to issues of damp in tenants’ homes, which is a major priority for the city.

An Intelligent Infrastructure project will introduce a digital Urban Traffic Management & Control system (UTMC) to monitor traffic and environmental conditions around the city. It is hoped that this will contribute towards the council’s understanding and abilities around clearing congestion and improving air quality. The system will continuously receive data from a range of sources, such as journey time, traffic flow and air quality, and act autonomously to make changes to traffic signal timings on the road network to improve traffic flow. It is already helping the council manage traffic flow disruptions produced by large events such as International Rugby at Murrayfield, as well as catering for diverted and altered traffic patterns due to roadworks or incidents on the trunk road network, such as the City Bypass or national motorway M8. Journey time monitoring will be provided using data from 10 major arterial routes in the city, alongside real-time data, to Traffic Scotland to manage responses to disruptions on the trunk road network.

In the next phase of the council’s smart city project, there are plans to install Air quality monitoring sensors across 10 locations, measuring levels of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and Particulate Matter (PM2.5 and PM10), with the opportunity of alerts when any areas experience poor air quality.

The programme has also seen 27,500 new iPads issued to pupils/teachers, refreshed iPads for up to 12,000 pupils/teachers and expanded connectivity thanks to additional wireless access points in schools. As well as the personal distribution to pupils, additional iPads have been handed out to P1 to P5 year groups so they can be shared for learning. The roll out for the Empowered Learning programme has been delivered by CGI and funded thanks to a £17.6m investment from the Council’s budget.