Japanese city turns to digital technology after massive snow drift

Deep snow cover literally strangled the streets of the small town of Kaga after a powerful blizzard hit the west coast of Japan in February 2018. When everyday life completely froze, the city authorities were inundated first with an avalanche of ineffective paper work, and then with a flurry of calls from a concerned population.

“Such a storm happens once every thirty years,” recalls Mitsumi Taniguchi, who runs civil engineering in the city. “Snow removal equipment was simply not able to handle it.”

Usually, the municipal authorities of Kaga City relied on the forces of external suppliers to perform snow removal, routes and registries were entered into tables by hand on paper. But this time, the scale of snowfall radically slowed down all the work. Drivers of snowplows could not cope with the gigantic volume, and municipal managers did not have reliable means in real time to obtain reliable information about the location of each snowthrower and the amount of work performed.

As a result, we were not able to instantly respond to requests from citizens, ”Taniguchi says. - This caused extreme inconvenience to everyone .

Finally, the streets were cleared and life in the city was restored. But the city authorities came to the conclusion that they needed to change a lot. So they turned to the Internet of things (IoT).

Last April, they began searching for a digital system that would help manage and coordinate the response of municipal authorities to snow drifts. Two criteria were identified as the most important: firstly, the system should determine the location of snowblowers with extreme accuracy using GPS technology, and secondly, operational reporting should be streamlined and executed in real time.

At the height of last summer, Kaga City city tenders held and a winner was announced by the end of September: SNOPLO I is a platform created by the local company Hokuryo Denko and hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

One of the distinguishing features of the SNOPLO I system was that it is a closed mobile network protected from congestion.

In short, it works as follows (see diagram below): shockproof smartphones are installed in the cab of each snow truck. They connect to the cloud through the NTT DOCOMO telephone provider’s closed network and over the Internet, and have access to Azure IoT Hub, Azure SQL Database, Azure Storage, and Azure App Service.

“The development of SNOPLO I actually began in the summer of 2015, and initially we used the cloud services of another vendor,” says Yuya Nagatani, chief engineer at Hokuryo Denko. - This pilot system worked on virtual machines. Field trials have shown that managing virtual machines leads to tremendous workloads and is time consuming security. At the same time, we had to reduce costs so that local authorities could use this system in their work. Although the system was to be used to control snow removal equipment only in winter, virtual machines also require payment in the summer. ”

Then Hokuryo Denko chose Azure as a cloud solution.

“With DevOps, he can easily deploy the applications that you have developed in a production environment. In addition, using the Azure IoT Hub allows you to support many devices and easily manage data and move to a serverless environment, ”says Nagatani.

Kag’s new snow removal solution is part of the city’s larger digital strategy, with a population of 68,000, which is significantly less than ten years ago.

Many other Japanese municipalities are called “endangered cities”, as fertility rates are falling and citizens are leaving in search of better economic prospects. Mayor of Riku Miyamoto wants to be sure that Kagu is not expecting the same demographic fate.

He believes that technology plays a key role in the fate of the city and its inhabitants, and can turn it into a much more attractive place to work and live by providing smart and efficient services along with growing job opportunities.

“Unlike other foreign technology companies, Microsoft is focusing on regional resurgence,” he says. “Our goal is to avoid the fate of a vanishing city.” We want to create a city ready for future challenges. If in the future we find ways for further collaboration with Microsoft, we will definitely be happy with this prospect. ”