Qatar Municipality launches phase one of Smart Cities Solutions Project

Minister of Municipality HE Abdullah bin Hamad bin Abdullah Al Attiyah inaugurated today the first phase of the Smart Cities Solutions Project, which includes the implementation of a smart waste management system, a vehicle management and tracking system, task distribution, and a central operations command platform within the Ministry of Municipality's Smart Cities Solutions Project.

This aligns with the Ministry's strategy for improving quality of life, well-being, and urban humanization, as well as enhancing services and digital transformation as part of the Ministry of Municipality's 2024-2030 strategy.

This system aims to monitor the movement and compliance of vehicles and their drivers with designated routes or geographic areas. It provides a complete historical record of each vehicle's movement, performance, and technical data during its operation. It also manages and monitors scheduled and emergency maintenance for vehicles, linking it to the mechanical equipment management store.

The system features the ability to monitor drivers and evaluate their performance, reassess vehicle movement routes and redistribute them geographically to provide shorter routes, thus saving time, consumption, and cost. It assigns and monitors tasks given to vehicles and drivers, recording their trips in real-time and maintaining a complete historical record of routes for verification and auditing purposes.

The first phase of smart waste management and vehicle tracking and task distribution began in Al Wakrah Municipality and will be expanded to all municipalities in subsequent phases.

This project is considered the largest of its kind to be implemented in a city in the Middle East, and is expected to significantly enhance public health conditions by effectively managing waste with automatically generated schedules and routes for waste container collection, reducing air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and CO2 emissions from vehicles, and significantly cutting waste collection costs through efficient monitoring of the entire waste management process using an advanced wireless tracking system.

Within the framework of this project, a total of 1,039 tracking devices have been installed for all government vehicle and equipment fleets, including sewage tanks equipped with specialized sensors to measure fluid levels.
The smart waste management system oversees all waste collection operations and components in Al Wakrah City, including 7,571 waste containers and 39 waste transport vehicles.

Specialized electronic sensors have been installed on the containers and waste transport vehicles to monitor and send data through a private information network (Internet of Things platform) to a central operations command platform. This platform monitors the operations and movements of all components within a smart system based on innovative AI and big data analysis technologies.

The container sensors connected to the IoT network read and monitor various data such as container fill level, temperature, geographical stability, and balance. Once data is collected, the system uses intelligent optimization algorithms to identify full containers and automatically distribute them into collection plans based on their size and determine the shortest collection and transport route for each vehicle based on actual and historical data.

As this process is automated from start to finish, it requires no human intervention, providing an advanced solution to reduce vehicle trips, resulting in less distance traveled, reduced fuel consumption, and more economical vehicle use leading to lower maintenance costs, road wear and tear, road maintenance, and traffic congestion during peak hours.

The vehicle management and tracking system oversees the Ministry's vehicle fleet, covering over 1,000 vehicles in its first phase, including waste transport vehicles, compactors, and tanks.

Source: The Peninsula Newspaper, The Peninsula