To achieve its Smart City ambitions, Tequila has partnered with government organisations and technology providers like Hitachi, as well as local companies and community groups. “We want to make Tequila better than it already is by enabling technological, educational and social change,” explains de Arteaga, who is spearheading the Smart City initiative. “Hitachi immediately understood our vision and the challenges we faced around data integration and scale.”
Tequila is using a number of Hitachi solutions, including Lumada Video Insights and Hitachi Smart Spaces, including Hitachi Video Analytics (HVA). HVA modules, such as Traffic Analyzer, Parking Space Analyzer, People Counter and Intrusion Detector, along with social media analytics, allow the city to combine and analyse data from past and present, to take smarter actions and improve management. “With support from Hitachi, we can leverage the power of big data in a strategic way,” says de Arteaga.
They have invested in an intelligent system for managing the overall tourism experience. Today, they have 15 working cameras, APs and sensors that have been positioned around the town to capture data on people and traffic volumes as well as the frequency of visits to restaurants and shops. With the Parking Space Analyzer and People Counter from Hitachi, Tequila can turn this data into valuable insights around visitor experience, behaviour and safety.
To help gauge the success of its Smart City efforts, Tequila uses Hitachi's Smart Spaces and Lumada Video Insights to track and visualize public sentiment across a range of sources, including social media, public wi-fi, capacity planning for local businesses and traffic monitoring across the town.
As the Smart City initiative gains momentum, Tequila will exploit the data it captures in real time to help residents and visitors make better choices about where to visit, eat and park. For example, intelligent displays will be positioned around the town to highlight the wait times for parking lots and restaurant tables as availability and capacity changes.
A command center where data can be aggregated and analyzed in real-time in Mexico City has been established to support the “Tequila Intelligente” project. “By making smarter use of data, we can make smarter use of all of Tequila’s resources,” says Hernandez.