Gwangju City Completes Construction of Smart Management System for Sangmu Underground Joint Duct

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Park Seon-gang] Gwangju Metropolitan City announced on the 24th that it has recently completed and officially started operating the Smart Management System construction project for the Sangmu Underground Joint Duct, the first project promoted under the government's Digital New Deal.

The underground joint duct is a national important facility jointly installed and operated underground as a central urban facility to improve urban aesthetics and efficiently manage and secure infrastructure such as electricity, telecommunications, and water supply.

However, unlike aboveground facilities, the underground joint duct is difficult to access and invisible, making monitoring and immediate active response challenging in the event of a disaster.

This project was promoted by investing 3.25 billion KRW of national funds, utilizing Digital New Deal technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), optical sensors, rail robots, and digital twins to build a smart integrated control system combining AI and IoT in the Sangmu Underground Joint Duct, where electricity, telecommunications, and water supply are concentrated.

In particular, using optical sensors, a regional strategic industry, a smart IoT infrastructure for abnormal diagnosis of power lines and communication lines and heat detection was established, and based on AI and digital twins, various safety information of the underground space is managed on an integrated control platform in the comprehensive situation room.

The AI-based integrated control platform will continuously produce, collect, and analyze real-time video and data for risk prediction in the future, and through AI learning, it can detect abnormalities in real time and predict disasters, safety accidents, and facility aging.

Additionally, for real-time anomaly detection and rapid response within the underground joint duct, it automatically identifies fire, facility damage, worker entry, safety gear wearing status, falls, and help requests.

Accordingly, in the event of a disaster, disaster information is simultaneously provided in real time to facility managers, fire stations, occupying agencies, and other related organizations to minimize damage. The information monitoring system is doubly installed at the Gwangju Fire Headquarters 119 Comprehensive Situation Room, enabling prompt action.

Gwangju City expects that, instead of relying on once-daily on-site inspections by personnel, AI will analyze data accumulated from the underground joint duct through smart IoT sensors to detect early signs of abnormalities, enabling early response and 24-hour continuous monitoring.

Moreover, four local small and medium-sized enterprises possessing AI and 4th industrial technology participated as a consortium in this project as the implementing companies, which is expected to significantly contribute to fostering local upstream and downstream industries, revitalizing the local economy, and creating jobs.

Jung Min-gon, Director of the City’s Citizen Safety Office, said, “As the nation’s first New Deal project, we have implemented a model of an AI-converged Digital New Deal project based on 4th industrial technologies in the Sangmu Underground Joint Duct in Gwangju. In the future, we will build real-time safety management systems for roads, bridges, rivers, urban life SOC, and buildings by integrating AI, IoT, 5G, and digital twins in Gwangju-type New Deal projects in the disaster safety field, and attract technology development and demonstration projects for citizen-centered life safety such as infectious diseases, traffic, child protection, and crime prevention to foster the safety industry and create jobs.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.