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projectThe Open Digital Platform (ODP) is a key component in the digital infrastructure underpinning Singapore’s Smart Nation ambition, which seeks to harness technology to bring benefits from digital transformation in society, economy and government to how people and businesses live, work and play.
This information was sourced from "Open Digital Platform (ODP)" by Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OECD), https://oecd-opsi.org/innovations/open-digital-platform-odp/. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO).
The Open Digital Platform (ODP) is a key component in the digital infrastructure underpinning Singapore’s Smart Nation ambition, which seeks to harness technology to bring benefits from digital transformation in society, economy and government to how people and businesses live, work and play. The ODP takes an integrated masterplan approach from the ground up, optimising and synergising building and estate facilities management and operations onto a unified cyber-physical platform of digital smart city solutions, alongside the physical district planning, architecture, and development. Where building systems traditionally had to be integrated with other systems one by one, the platform’s Open Standard Multi-Protocol Middleware makes it a thing of the past – with ODP, each system now integrates only once with the platform. Being developed in a modular, reusable manner enables the formation of a Smart Estate Ecosystem of integrated smart city solutions – such as facilities, building and estate management systems, district cooling system, and pneumatic waste conveyancing system – and makes for rapid deployment nationwide.
A cross-agency collaboration within the Singapore Government including JTC Corporation (“JTC”), Government Technology Agency (“Govtech”), Cyber Security Agency (“CSA”) and Infocomm Media Development Authority (“IMDA”), the ODP’s flagship achievement will be at Punggol Digital District (PDD), where it will serve as a district-level open digital platform connecting different systems, products, services and applications. Centralization of district operations for better operations management is expected to reduce operational manpower, and energy consumption by up to 30%. The ODP is designed to abstract building systems to allow for seamless development, integration and interoperability between these systems that leverage the platform, optimising and synergising building facilities management and operations onto a unified platform of digital smart city solutions. Enabled by the ODP, the district master developer can now enable seamless system-to-system interoperability and communication, monitor, manage and control district operations via the C3 system, and model and simulate different operational scenarios via the Digital Twin. The ODP was deployed in 2021 – and is currently operational – at the JTC Corporation headquarters. Beyond the targeted implementation at PDD, there are further plans for the ODP to eventually be implemented at other JTC estates.
The integrated masterplan approach marks a change in the traditional physical-first, digital-later approach to building infrastructure. When the digital infrastructure is left as an afterthought, it gives rise to many challenges in system integration efforts afterwards. To ensure maximum interoperability with current systems, the ODP uses Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) and Building Information Model (BIM) technologies, common communication protocols and open data schemas. Efficient integration and system-to-system interoperability by leveraging the ODP facilitates the seamless provision of new and innovative estate services such as robotic systems and independent system-to-system operations in last-mile robot delivery. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AIML) models optimise energy consumption, utilisation of in-building amenities and vertical transport services in ODP-enabled districts. Data collected by Internet of Things (IoT) sensors throughout the estate ingested by the ODP allow for this.
The ODP was deployed in 2021 – and is currently operational at the JTC’s headquarters, the JTC Summit, which has seen the successful functional integration of five building hard systems – elevator system, escalator system, building ACMV, and access control and security systems – and several building services such as mail delivery, electric vehicle charging stations, meeting room occupancy, and temperature monitoring and control. The ODP will be deployed to Singapore’s first digital district located at Punggol by 2024. Building and estate systems to be integrated with ODP include pneumatic waste conveyancing, district cooling and smart energy grid systems.
The Open Digital Platform is a cross-agency collaboration which includes JTC Corporation (“JTC”), Government Technology Agency (“Govtech”), Cyber Security Agency (“CSA”), Infocomm Media Development Authority (“IMDA”) and Singapore Technologies Engineering (ST Engineering).
ODP was developed in efforts to aid Singapore in achieving its pledge to cap its emissions by 2030. Through ODP implementations in smart districts and estates, it reduces the resources consumed in the estate by approximately 30% in energy and water consumption, and 50% in facilities management manpower compared to similar estates. It also increases the satisfaction with estate services by 80% and boosts R&D development collaborations with more than 5 significant R&D projects, each >$100k using the Digital Twin of the ODP per year. With more collaboration efforts to develop smart solutions and services, ODP also opens up the generation of jobs and growth opportunities for the community and through these smart services, it can bring better living lifestyle and in turn create a greener & sustainable estate.
The current IoT landscape consists of a wide range of protocols and formats, giving rise to several key challenges: Unstructured data and multiple data formats, leading to difficulty in data correlation; High costs of integrating and implementing systems as businesses seek to compensate the perceived loss of profits incurred by opening proprietary protocols; Difficulty in holistic sense-making and operations when data is held in siloed systems. Working with incumbent systems proved to be a challenge as the older systems were either not networked or lacked digital capabilities. Building networks, systems, processes and personnel operating and managing the buildings need to undergo a digital transformation in some form to bring about a successful digitalisation of district operations and workflows. Balancing data sharing (openness) with data privacy also contributed to the list of challenges.
The Open Digital Platform was deployed in 2021 and is currently operational at the JTC Corporation headquarters. Beyond the targeted implementation at PDD, there are further plans for the ODP to eventually be implemented at other JTC estates. The integrate-once, modular and reusable design approach in integrating building systems with the platform means it can be easily replicated across different estates. The open standard multi-protocol middleware framework can be adopted for a variety of projects.
Factors that would condition replication would include:
The current Digital Twin is developed based on the individual estates JTC builds and currently only allows access for a single group of users. The future of the Digital Twin should be multi-user, with capabilities to integrate with multiple platforms and solutions like ESRI, Autodesk, Omniverse, and provide large enough scenes where an entire city can be loaded in for command-and-control purposes.
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