Chosen to lead the Sustainable Cities Centre of Excellence (CoE) in AI on October 15, as part of the Ministry of Education’s initiative Make AI in India, Make AI Work for India’, IIT Kanpur prepares to start actual work in Phase II starting January 1, 2025.

Academic partners in the project also include IISc Bengaluru, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Gandhinagar, IIIT Delhi, NIT Calicut and Princeton University. Adani Total Gas Limited, Adani Electricity, Tata Consultancy Services and Multi Modal Transport Solutions Startups are also part of the coalition.

The 4.5-year programme will leverage AI to address existing and original problems and challenges related to sustainable cities like including energy forecasting, air quality, urban flood management and developing digital twins for transportation and city management along with startups, industries and tech companies.

Phase I spanning seven months had bids from 5 top institutes which were screened and evaluated. IIT Kanpur led consortium was awarded the contract. The project is being implemented as Section 8 company (Not for Profit) and has a board of directors and  a project monitoring committee.

“The idea is that we will address the problems we are working on by creating new products like software, hardware or a combination of both with the intent that they are scalable across cities. The aim is to create an eco-system of developing innovative ideas which can then be commercialised,” said Prof. Sachchida Nand Tripathi, dean, Kotak School of Sustainability at IIT Kanpur and project director designate.

In the area of energy demand and forecasting, the project will work both for CNG and PNG and cable and transformer fault detection.These issues will be addressed for the city of Mumbai as per information provided by the institute.

The project has already demonstrated energy demand and forecasting along with Adani for Ahmedabad and Faridabad.  

For air quality management it will use cutting-edge monitoring systems with multimodal data to create hyper air quality monitoring and pollution spike detection for in-time intervention.

Some use cases have already been demonstrated successfully on IIT Kanpur campus and Lucknow developing Hotspot detection at unprecedented scale of half a square kms using satellite data along with data from some government monitors and sensors. This will now be taken forward. A network of 1,370 hotspot sensors using satellite data along with some government monitors and sensors  has been implemented in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

“Some of these ideas are already in the process of deployment validation. We will fine tune and step up it's TRL (technology readiness levels) and then try to take them to most cities. This will directly cut the nexus between pollution and other kind of energy used by people," said Prof Tripathi.

For developing urban mobility solutions the project will develop Digital Twin (a virtual  mode of a physical object that is updated in real time with data from sensors on the object) for Indian roads. As an example unlike Google Maps at present, which provides optimal route for commute between two points but not real time prediction, digital twin will provide not only predictions but also real time solutions like how to decongest a road.

“Digital Twin can also help in infrastructure planning, simulating real time data to show which mode of transport can be ideal for a commute or from point A to B. For example, whether an elevated bridge, or a metro or monorail will be ideal between two points with maximum benefit and help in overall reduction of vehicles on roads used for private commute,” explained Prof Tripathi, adding that digital twin using video feeds has been successfully piloted in the city of Bengaluru and in the process of validation. For multimodal transport an app has been developed by a start up at IIIT Delhi and Pune which is being used by few lakh commuters.

For flood and disaster management, flood information coming on digital platform will be collated with feeds from CCTV video camera installed in cities as well as sensors  to avert weather related issues and disasters.

“Under the Smart Cities Program along with other citizen services in Digital India like job applications, issuance of passport, driving licence etc, this interactive platform with information and updates about air quality and hyper local information about air quality, flood forecasting, transport, citizen grievances can be directed to the concerned department in real time for efficient smart city management. The information can then come with a time line history on the supervisors dashboard. This will help in resolving problems and avoid interdepartmental blame game,” said Prof Tripathi, adding that waste segregation using AI is now an emerging technique.  

“Solutions such as these take data from multimodal platform channels and embed them to make available in the form which is accessible to the city governments for decision making and in time interventions and for citizens to avail amenities. With 4000 cities in India, IIT Kanpur, CoE in AI for Sustainable Cities is working with this  idea to take these such solutions to scale across the country along with its consortium of startups and Industries.”

“Our cities are either over designed or under designed because we do not have real time simulators with actual data. What is required is optimal design keeping people and the environment in the center of it,” he added.

Other centres of excellence  in artificial intelligence announced by the government are CoE in healthcare, led by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and CoE in agriculture led by IIT Ropar in  Punjab. The government has said that AI driven CoE’s are going to be solution providers and create a new generation of employment providers and wealth creators.