By 2025, more than 27 billion devices will be connected electronically, according to Raj Jayaraman, head of strategy at HCL Technologies
HCL Technologies is one of the 20 largest publicly traded companies in India, worth more than $50 million. With more than 175,000 employees, the firm has offices in more than 50 countries. Annual revenue runs around $10 billion.
Jayaraman addressed attendees at IoT Evolution Expo 2022 in Fort Lauderdale, FL. The subject was the implementation of remote-control management within smart-city projects.
The boom is device connections is due to advances in the Internet of Things and the move to 5G technology: Smart cities are on the way.
“This is going to become the norm,” Jayaraman said. “To do something like a smart city development is a huge undertaking.”
HCL was hired to establish a digital surveillance for a smart city project in Mexico City. The program involved installing and operation of 150,000 electronic surveillance posts. Each installations featured both camera and microphone.
The project’s goals were four-fold:
- Improve citizen safety
- Expedite official response times
- Learn what just happened in real time
- Record incident data for use or study.
HCL partners with an infrastructure provider who precedes them in development. Once the city’s backbone is upgraded, the project’s smart components can be installed.
Smart-city installations collect data that can be used to diagnose potential issues before they happen. Proactive servicing can prevent costly unexpected downtime, he said.
As an example, Jayaraman pointed to the down escalator located outside the meeting room. It wasn’t working, though serviceman were prowling it all day. “They knew we were coming,” he said. “But nothing they have is smart enough to tell them it’s about to fail.”
Remote control management programs are designed to solve field service problems.
“We don’t have a skilled person who can go resolve each problem,” Jayaraman said.
His reasons for implementing remote-control management include:
- Connecting/Life Cycle Management. “How do we connect users across multiple devices?”
- Operational Monitoring. “How do you make sure it’s monitored constantly?”
- Issue Identification and Resolution. “How do we fix it with the least number of staff onsite?”
Since electronic assets installed in smart cities are valuable, essential and sensitive, remote monitoring is imperative. According to Jayaraman, successful remote-control management includes establish protocols for:
- Remote asset tracking
- Asset health monitoring
- Asset lifecycle management
- Asset workflow automation
- Productive asset management.
“The technology is moving at such a fast rate that what works today might not work tomorrow,” he said.
Other challenges with implementing remote asset management include:
- Operating in a non-heterogenous environment
- Dealing with multiplicity of locations
- Assimilating different varieties of data
- Integrating disparate systems in a timely fashion.
At all times, data collection is the focus: “All intelligence is done at the edge,” Jayaraman said. “We build the core analytics on top of the core building blocks.”
Edited by
Erik Linask
