Hudson County in New Jersey is working with Honeywell on developing and implementing a smart community plan.

The project aims to help increase resident engagement, strengthen community resilience, reduce energy consumption, improve public safety and help ease traffic congestion and improve mobility, including safety.

The effort with Hudson County is one of the first smart county initiatives in the USA aimed at helping modernise a county’s infrastructure to enable a more efficient, more sustainable and resilient community for residents and visitors.

“Our goal is for Hudson County to set the standard for a smart and efficient county,” said Craig Guy, chief of staff to the Hudson County Executive. “As our community continues to grow, we are looking forward to working with Honeywell to develop and execute a strategic plan that supports our overarching goals and improves the quality of life for everyone in our county.”

The Hudson County Smart Community initiative includes the development of a plan and support for a federal grant application to help fund projects defined during the process. The effort is focused on enhancing county operations and integrating systems across the county to automate and streamline processes to serve citizens, enable proactive building maintenance to reduce operating costs and improve occupant comfort, and support fleet electrification and community resilience.

The initiative aims to lessen manual processes of Hudson County and enhance residents’ experiences with county services through improved customer response times with the proposed upgrades.

“Hudson County is proactively working to identify operational efficiencies and opportunities to build resilience,” said Matthew Britt, smart cities general manager at Honeywell. “This programme is unique as Hudson County is one of the first counties in the country working to build deeper system connections between its cities with the aim to improve how people across the county move, live, work and play.”

The Honeywell City Suite software is a ready-now artificial-intelligence enabled platform that integrates data from critical city infrastructure systems such as traffic, streetlights, environment, emergency services, public safety and security, and utilities into a single, unified view.