Streets, bridges, waterworks: The maintenance of Hamburg’s infrastructure is complex. How does the city manage to balance necessary construction sites and flowing traffic?
Hamburg has more bridges than any other city in Europe. For Germany’s second largest city it’s a complex task to maintain its 2,500 bridges and other structures like pedestrian tunnels, locks, flood barriers, and embankments.
The State Agency for Roads, Bridges and Waterways (LSBG) operates a large portion of the traffic infrastructure in Hamburg and is responsible for the entire lifespan of these public works.
“We’re an important player in flood protection and the prevention of water pollution as well as the maintenance of most roads and bridges in Hamburg,” Erdinc Karabugday, head of Planning and Controlling at LSBG, shares. “Together with our network, we build and protect everything that keeps Hamburg together.”
SAP technology is one building block to perform this duty safely and efficiently.
Free Flow of Traffic as Top Priority
Mobility plays a key role in the lives of people in Hamburg and other major cities. Bridges bear a particularly heavy load, because they are critical junctions in the city’s transportation network. Tracking the condition of bridges and planning for their maintenance needs and upgrades is vitally important to keep people moving in urban areas.
Karabugday describes the problem in a nutshell: “Our objectives are long term, so basing operational decisions solely on the current situation isn’t enough. We need comprehensive data for the strategic context – not only economic aspects, but social and ecological impacts as well. Our SAP solution supports us with this.”
The manual entry of damage to structures like bridges used to be very expensive and time-consuming, a complex process made even more difficult by the fact that data entry and analysis are performed by both the agency’s own staff and external companies.
Digital Representation of Infrastructure
To reduce Hamburg’s renovation backlog and create a sustainable long-term solution, LSBG teamed with SAP to develop a standardized data platform. One central aspect involves merging data from a variety of sources on SAP HANA Cloud, making it possible to blend data such as the location and condition of each structure. The results feed into a digital model of streets and bridges and can be used to guide decisions and generate precise forecasts for maintenance and budget planning.
Ulrike Brecht, architect advisor in Customer Advisory Public Sector at SAP Germany, explains: “The project was initially intended to handle bridge maintenance. Employees conduct the necessary maintenance work and inspections on site. They also document the condition of a structure, ensuring that necessary maintenance measures are carried out at the right time.”
All available data on the structures, including road and bridge data as well as geographic and monitoring data, is merged in SAP HANA Cloud. When combined with aging models for the structures, this information can be used for forecasting when specific road segments will require resurfacing, for instance.
These data-driven forecasts put infrastructure budget planning on a new, firmer foundation and make it possible to define the priorities for object renovation to minimize the impact on traffic flows and the lives of urban residents.
Future Urban Platforms
Cities around the world face enormous challenges in the coming years when it comes to protecting and maintaining their residents’ quality of life. Dr. Philipp Schulz was a research assistant at the University of Heidelberg and wrote his doctoral thesis on digital urban development. Today, he advises cities and communities on topics like revitalizing inner cities, redesigning public spaces, and civic participation.
One trend Schulz has observed in the cities and towns he works with is the development of urban dashboards that show all the data collected in a city as important parameters such as air quality, weather forecasts, and movements of people.
For Schulz, developing a long-term digital strategy is one of the pillars of modern urban planning.
“From my perspective the term ‘smart city’ is outdated,” he says. “Today I call it ‘platform urbanism,’ an approach in which different players and their information are brought together on one platform.” Platform urbanism describes how apps and websites are changing the way people in cities live, work, and interact with one another. It involves the digitalization of individual areas, which are then brought together incrementally.
The city of Hamburg is on the right track. “Hamburg’s goal is to handle the full maintenance management of its infrastructure through a standardized data platform,” says Brecht.
The city is in the process of expanding the accomplishments of this project to other areas, such as the maintenance of public parks and municipal buildings.