LVIV, Ukraine - The city administration of Lviv aims to develop sophisticated technological solutions for municipal services to make the western Ukrainian city of 730,000 residents a more comfortable place to live and work.
Oleh Synyutka, Lviv deputy mayor, called information technology the city’s second most effective development tool, after tourism, for the next five years.
“Lviv is already known for being Ukraine’s cultural Mecca,” Synyutka said at a Dec. 9 press conference. “But this is not enough to become a progressive tourist center of European standard unless the city is modernized with the information technologies.”
Three major IT projects are already under way to enhance public services and city infrastructure. They cover public transport, healthcare, energy and water supply.
GPRS trackers
Special General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) units are installed in public transportation vehicles to track their location and speed. Signals are sent from each unti to a central dispatcher, where a support team checks the schedule and transport rotation. While the GPRS connection is provided by Kyivstar, a mobile services company, SoftServe Municipal Technologies developed the software.
SoftServe’s head of development Andriy Satursky says they started working on the project in 2012 with its own money. According to Satursky, the project has two goals – to regulate public transport frequency and check the performance of private transportation firms.
“Before we ran the project, the vehicles of private firms could stay in the auto park for hours, while Lvivans had to wait for them at the stations thinking there is a huge lack of public transport in the city,” Satursky says. “Now vehicles are tracked precisely, which raised the effectiveness of public transport rotation.”
Doctor Eleks
Doctor Eleks is an information system for medical organizations to manage medical records. It stores data on patients from various medical institutions.
Eleks, a Ukrainian IT company from Lviv, developed the database. “It is like 1C business software that helps an enterprise to run all its inner operations smoothly while they are all connected with each other,” said Vsevolod Kachmar, a manager in charge of selling Doctor Eleks. “It can also be shared with other institutions, if needed… Hospitals and private clinics also need a tool that automatizes the processes.”
Developers claim Doctor Eleks helps medical organizations cut their costs and improves efficiency, while ensuring that registration records and laboratory results do not get lost. For a doctor, it is possible to set appointments through the software and communicate with patients in a private cabinet.
The system is already running in 40 private and municipal clinics not only in Lviv, but also Kyiv, Odesa and other Ukrainian cities. Any medical organization can download a free trial version in Ukrainian, Russian and English on the Doctor Eleks website.
Energy, water tracking
Energy and water supply tracking is also being tested by the city.
GPRS units are installed on electricity and water supply counters, sending the information from the counters to servers of Lvivvodokanal, a municipal supplier of utility services, where it is converted into figures, aggregated and analyzed. The data is used to project the utility service expenditures, possible water leaks or fluctuations in daily electric power supply. It also helps to detect electric power and water supply breaks.
After the project started running in July, more than 107 units were installed in apartments, private houses and office buildings in Lviv; another 42 will be installed this month.
The GPRS software is free and being used by Lvivvodokanal. Developed by engineers of Lvivvodokanal, the project has become part of a City Hall investment plan with a Hr 27 million budget. The full launch of the system is planned for spring.
“So far our system proves to be the most effective and innovative in Lviv, although similar systems already exist in Kyiv, Sumy and Poltava,” says Mykhaylo Khamon, head of the technology department at Lvivvodokanal. “The National Commission for State Energy and Public Utilities Regulation is already interested in our project, so hopefully this will help us to enforce full coverage of the system not only in Lviv, but Lviv Oblast and, maybe, other Ukrainian cities as well.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe.
