The Kingdom of Bahrain has announced plans for building smart cities in the next few years. According to the Central Informatics Organization (CIO), 2018 will see initial tests and documentation of mapping three dimensional models of entire cities, with implementation in 2019.
“The government is now working on documenting everything three dimensionally, weather it is below ground or above ground. That initiative will open up the doors for you to design buildings three dimensionally, see the impact three dimensionally, see the impact on the sewage system or power grid etc,” (CIO) director general of information systems Shaikh Salman bin Mohammed Al Khalifa said. “The first phase is to document. Beginning of next year, we are going to do a three-dimensional trial in Manama. A lot of the projects in 2018 is related to documenting the Kingdom three dimensionally whether above ground or below ground. It is not one entity’s job, it is 7 to 8 entities doing it together. For instance, you need EWA to define what is below ground, you need the road directorate, the Works Ministry etc. You need a unified approach in 2018. The reasons we have trial is because we need to do a non-invasive scanning of underground utilities. Scan will show the electric cables, sewage pipe, water pipes, type of soil. The scan will reveal the obstacles you might face. This is why you need trial. So we will do the trial next year and if it is successful you will face mass deployment in 2019. The collected data will be added to all governments and architects so they can use it in planning big projects and then we can start Building Information Modeling (BIM). The priority right now is to transition into 3D and collaborate using 3D. The real fruits of the efforts will be seen in 2020.”