Da Nang is on track of realising its goal of building information and communications technology infrastructure throughout the city by 2030. Accordingly, the “data warehouse” must be completed, serving the development of the city.

Employees at the city-based United Technologies Corporation are pictured being at work

This is one of the objectives of the city’s landmark project for building itself into a smart city over the 2018 – 2025 period, with a vision towards 2030. This project will be submitted to the municipal People's Council for approval by late this year.

The implementation of the project for the 2018 – 2025 period is expected to cost around 2,130 billion VND.

The city is expected to use funds from the municipal mid-term public investment budget for the 2016 – 2020 period, and the national government’s fundings for IT development and application.

Accordingly, building a smart city in Da Nang must meet 5 criteria, namely intelligent administration, streamlined urban management, smart public services, open data, and the enhancement of life quality.

In order to implement the above-mentioned criteria, Da Nang will gradually achieve specific objectives. In detail, by 2020, the city will have expanded the MAN (metropolitan area network) spanning the entire city, and enhanced the capacity of the data centre.

In addition, dedicated monitoring, managing and processing centres for linking and analysing interdisciplinary data will be set up. Over the next 2 years, heed will be paid to perfecting the databases of healthcare and education sectors.

By 2025, Da Nang will have completed smart applications to serve businesses, citizens and visitors, and made a shift from the traditional urban management to digital data management. The highlight of this period is the completion of most specialised databases - which are considered to be the “heart” of a smart city.

It is expected that the city will continue to deploy the smart city model in Lien Chieu District, and develop smart urban cluster models in the Hi-tech and concentrated IT parks, and the Software Park No 2.

By 2030, the community apps will have been developed in an intelligent manner. With diversified information and communications technology infrastructure and data warehouses developed in the preceding development stages, Da Nang will focus on promoting the applications of such technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality to support the local government, businesses and residents to enhance the efficiency of administration in all aspects of social life, streamline the apparatus, increase competitiveness, and create new development motivation.

Mr Ho Phu Hien, an architect from the FPT Software (FSoft) company, remarked that Da Nang boasts the advantage of having IT architecture framework and technical infrastructure.

He also underscored the importance of enhancing the level of integration of applications to enrich the database, address practical needs, and simplify public access to smart services in the city.

FSoft is now ready to cooperate with the city to deploy some smart applications such as the application of chatbot into public services offered by the city’s Public Service Portal with its hotline 0236 1022, and the debut of smart travel cards based on the existing Danang FantastiCity chatbot.

Meanwhile, Mr Le Anh Vu, the Director of the CMC Telecom Value Added Service Centre, affirmed his unit’s willingness to assist Da Nang in using the technology platform and infrastructure to deploy artificial intelligence experiments.

Mr Nguyen Quang Thanh, the Director of municipal Department of Information and Communications, the local authorities have always encouraged all city-dwellers, businesses and visitors to directly participate in smart city building. In particular, businesses and inhabitants in the city will be always welcomed to provide free non-commercial, non-sensitive data to the general public.