A German delegation is travelling to the headquarters of telecommunications vendor Huawei in Shenzhen, China - in an effort to become a fully-fledged smart city.
The Mayor of Duisburg is leading a 19-person government delegation on the visit to China where it will analyze, explore and examine some of the cutting edge innovations and technologies being trialed by Huawei as part of its primary mission which is to make Duisburg a global-leading smart city.
Huawei signed a MoU with Duisburg in January of this year, as part of an ambitious strategic plan to transform the industrial city into a service-orientated smart city through several key pillars such as smart government, smart port logistics, smart education, smart infrastructure, 5G and broadband, smart homes, and urban IoT.
The delegation will be shown demonstrations of smart city implementations, Internet of Things solutions and Huawei's cloud data center which is utilized to create smart solutions on demand. In addition the 19-person party will visit the command center in the Longgang District of Shenzhen, in which the Chinese vendor helped to construct.
It is designed to allow people to experience real-life smart city management applications, such as incident assignment, cross-agency emergency collaboration, risk monitoring, data sharing, decision-making support, quality checking, and visualization of data.
As the European economic hub of the Belt and Road Initiative, Duisburg has the world's largest inland port and is the business and logistics center connecting Europe and China. The cooperation between Huawei and Duisburg is based on building an open and cooperative international ecosystem.
As aforementioned above the relationship between Huawei and the city of Duisburg began with the penning of a MoU in January, but that partnership was solidified further when both parties signed a DVV framework agreement on the Rhine Cloud.
The Rhine Cloud is the brand name of a smart city and public service cloud platform and smart city services which has been specifically created in an effort to achieve Duisburg's vision of becoming a smart city and realizing the ambition of its Smart Duisburg 2.0 vision.
In the future, Huawei and its partners will provide Duisburg with leading expertise and solutions in 5G LTE technology and wireless broadband networks. This will significantly promote the development of Duisburg in areas such as self-driving vehicles, smart logistics, and Industry 4.0.
"We're happy to work with Huawei to transform Duisburg to a smart city," said Mayor of Duisburg, Sören Link. "We've had lots of exciting projects during the process of working with Huawei which inspired us in our work. Duisburg already has a tight connection with China. Through the cooperation with Huawei, such partnership with China grows even stronger."