Tapping into Technology Solutions to Automate and Streamline: How the City of Calgary is Adopting Technology to Advance as a Smart City

Thinking About the Future of Calgary

Municipalities across the world aim to provide the best services they can to their residents, and most of them do this with limited resources but with great passion and drive. Across Canada, like across most countries, each municipality wants to ensure that are well equipped with the latest technologies, and that they have the opportunities to continually improve. This is as true at the City of Calgary as it is anywhere. In fact, Jan Bradley, the Chief Information Technology Officer within the People, Innovation and Collaboration Services, says that although operational excellence means different things to different people, for them it is really about how they influence our community at the City of Calgary. They’re very focused on making life better every day. As such, they are always trying to improve municipal services, particularly from a technology perspective. Everyone who is part of the IT team has a strong sense of curiosity and a willingness to experiment, and together they are moving the City to the next level.

For many people, the pandemic highlighted how critical IT is to the strategic success of service delivery. Now is the opportunity to leverage that goodwill and translate it to operational improvements. Calgary has begun that by creating new departments within the IT team based on emerging technologies, and each has a strong focus on operational excellence and delivery as well.^[1] They have also worked with the marketing department to create their vision on a single page, with the brilliant tagline of ‘We’re in IT for Calgarians’. This gives us our north star, and it has also opened up many conversations in the community. They are always looking to see what emerging technologies they know about and the ones they don’t know about yet. They look for what might offer significant benefit to our municipal service delivery colleagues. The new IT campaign has crystallized the pipeline and program of work at the City, and has given the IT team a clearer focus about what they do and why they do it.

Connecting the Tech to Things

One of the most exciting projects that the City has pioneered is connected to the Internet of Things (IoT). This is one of the emerging technologies that is currently being talked about, but Colin Adderley, an IT Engineer in the Information Technology team at the City, says that they have engaged with it since 2016. Like most municipalities, they have a lot of fixed infrastructure, like radio towers, and though they have had connected vehicles for years, what they weren’t able to do was to provide data between the infrastructure. What they wanted was to have visibility to things around Calgary, especially where the infrastructure is not fixed. As such, they invested in LoRaWan – Long Range Wide Area Network^[2] – which is essentially an industrial grade battery powered device that can transmit low amounts of data up to five to seven kilometres.

Once the idea was established, the next part of the journey was to see whether this technology was good for them or whether it wasn’t. 2017 was therefore all about infrastructure testing and research, in partnership with the University of Calgary. When it was ready for public testing, they decided to do a controlled experiment at the Devonian Gardens, which is an exotic indoor garden park next to a commercial mall. They set up sensors across the gardens, in lights, in the soil and for the air, and the idea was that if it could work in these gardens, which isn’t conducive to such an operating environment, then it could work elsewhere as well. Of course it worked, and so they started to roll it out to seven radio towers to conduct use case testing, which was the original goal. By 2019, there were two trends that started to emerge. The first was that in order to connect their assets in the way they wanted to, there were no products on the market to solve these problems. So the goal was to focus on understanding how we could apply our solution to the radio power technology. But the second trend was that with IoT still emerging, it has some cyber risks, so they needed to gain more knowledge to help them future plan.

The goal of developing LoRaWAN was not simply to connect it to towers, but to gain use from it for the City. As such, once they were happy with all the testing, they created a smart garbage bin in early 2020. The first version was an off-the-shelf sensor bolted onto an existing bin, but it was tampered with and stolen. So the second iteration came from one of their fleet fabrication shops with a custom designed sensor, making it look like a steel box with public art on it and an opening. Once active, it could communicate to a radio tower over 5 kilometres away, providing information on serviceability. For instance, the data shows when it is used and how. For a single garbage can, that’s not really a big deal, but when you scale it across a large city with all our parks, they may be able to find some ability to become more operationally efficient. As an example, a bin next to a dog park is used more often than a bin in a public park. Moreover, the weather and the positioning affect how they are and should be servicing this asset.

Connecting LoRaWAN to bins is useful, but they are mostly fixed assets. Connecting it to a vehicle that can transmit via GPS coordinates every five seconds is truly ground-breaking. The next step therefore is to connect it to water meters, to the cars of mobile consultants, and beyond. In fact, if it is connected to multiple radio towers in close proximity then the broadcast range increases too, and this means it can be even more useful. Although this has been part of the pipeline since 2016, in reality it is still in its infancy. They think this is a great augmented technology to help support fixed infrastructure and operations where it’s a lot more expensive to bring in fixed infrastructure. If used well, it will help them become more efficient, and expand their network and reach. They are still working on use cases and security techniques, as well as leveraging what they’ve learned over the past five years, but the potential is almost limitless.

Using Robotics and AI to Create Efficiency

Another emerging technology that has been embraced by the City of Calgary is robotics, or as Nan Xie from the IT Field Mobility Solutions team at the City says, the field of RPA, which is Robotic Process Automation, or the so-called digital workers or bots that help them automate various processes. The City has used bots for quite some time, and these days there are 26 bots working actively across more than ten business units. The role of those bots is not to replace humans, but it is to replace repetitive processes that can become tedious and mind-numbing for humans, like entering a lot of data or processing a lot of the same kind of files. To determine if a bot is suitable for a task, the underlying principle is that they want their employees, their resources, to take care of what’s important in the field but let their bots or their technology automate the rest. This is sometimes a bit broad and there is always human oversight, but the principle generally stands.

One of the current tasks is to automate the call centres across the entire municipality. This automation will provide governance and will develop a sustainment model that will help all their field workers, or the field operation team, and will make that work more efficiently. The beauty of the RPA technology is that it is highly reusable. Once we develop the bots, we can easily reconfigure them for similar cases. That makes it cost efficient, and together with AI technology and machine learning, the possibilities are endless. For instance, when there a large crowds at major events, it is important for the City and the security officials to be able to manage the crowds. Generally this was done based on estimates or calculated guessing. These days, with RPA and AI, we use camera and deep learning algorithms to do the crowd counting almost instantly, using the camera data. Even at night or in large crowds and somewhat grainy footage when the video quality is challenging, the outcomes are still very accurate, and this has been confirmed by manual counting from a still of the image. 

Another application of this tech is for assessing pavement conditions. Many roads have pothole or other minor impediments. Some are tiny, but they can get bigger over time, so identifying them and fixing them early is beneficial. Rather than humans scouring every street on a regular basis, a camera with the appropriate machine learning algorithms can accurately detect the potholes, and in use case testing, generally more accurate than humans. If it works on the ground, why not use it for buildings? So another application has been in conjunction with the fire department using predictive AI to detect what type of buildings might have a higher priority for inspections. This is based on the building history and materials, but also on hazard and risk factors that the AI can identify. 

Internally, the same kind of technology is being used in supply management to categorize all of the City’s spending. That includes everything from salaries and phone calls to construction and travels, and everything in between. Currently, based on all the factors, they’re able to achieve 98% accuracy on all of their classifications, and they can break it down into different categories. Internally, the tech is also being used for intelligent document processing. Traditionally, many people would handwrite notes or would annotate receipts or other documents, and then would PDF them. For any of this to be processed, it would require the information being entered into the system. Using AI, we’re able to process hundreds of these files, feeding the data directly into our systems, and it has saved a lot of time. There are many other applications for RPA, AI and IoT that the City is exploring. From sensors in water pipes to monitor levels, to acoustic sensors, to predictive AI for the construction industry. All of these, and many other options, could potentially better help their operations team to understand what happens in the field.

Integrating the Challenges of the Future

To some extent, the culmination of all of the emerging technologies is the Technology Integration Centre (TIC),^[3] which the City has commissioned and is in the process of creating. David Basto, the Smart City, Technology Integration Centre Lead at the City, says that sometimes they need to build infrastructure that takes a long time to realize, and that is what the TIC is all about. All of the technologies already discussed are existent, but they are still called emerging because it will take years for them to reach their full potential. Chances are that in the coming decade, they will likely witness an unprecedented surge in technological advancements driven by a convergence of disruptive technologies. The TIC is one way of addressing the potential coming challenges. It’s designed to cultivate an experimental culture within the City and foster a deep understanding of the emerging technologies that will shape our services and investment decisions. It is about learning what works and what doesn’t, and where we should put our money.

Although the TIC has characteristics of both, it is neither an innovation centre nor an incubator. Innovation is about coming up with ideas. Though the TIC will be involved in research, their role is very passive. The TIC is about focusing on technologies that have sufficient maturity to rapidly scale and that can be applied to City services quickly. It is therefore about expansion and integrating with common platforms. It is also not an incubator because those are generally for start-ups looking to broaden their wings, whereas the TIC will be internally focused, driving value for internal business units looking to transform their services. It is about providing an environment that is safe, accessible, frictionless, connected and private. By designing the centre to intentionally break down barriers, we increase our chances for success.

The centre is not built yet, but all the planning has been completed and there is already a pipeline of work that fits into an ecosystem rather than a facility. As such, the TIC has entered into partnerships with universities, transport companies, research centres and other similar facilities to work on projects related to urban design, drones and transportation, quantum computing and AI Large Language Models (LLMs). There is a place for long term planning. Navigating the uncertainties of the future demands an intentional approach to informing our investment decisions. This program is designed to accelerate digital transformation and will provide new capabilities that will lead to operational excellence for years to come.

Featured Speakers: 

• Jan Bradley, Chief Information Technology Officer, People, Innovation and Collaboration Services, The City of Calgary
• David Basto, Smart City, Technology Integration Centre Lead, The City of Calgary
• Nan Xie, IT Field Mobility Solutions, The City of Calgary
• Colin Adderley, IT Engineer, Information Technology, The City of Calgary