HCM City Open University held a two-day International Conference on Structural Health Monitoring and Engineering Structures on December 15-16. Photo courtesy of the university

HCM CITY— HCM City needs additional IT staff and engineers to help the city develop infrastructure for its smart-city building project, Dr. Lê Thanh Cường, head of HCM City Open University's department of materials and structural engineering, has said.

Cường said on Tuesday on the sidelines of an international conference in the city that universities should "strengthen training in majors that would help the city’s project. If the city does not have human resources in these majors, the project will be difficult to carry out effectively."

At the conference, Prof. Fu-Kuo Chang of Stanford University in the US spoke about structural health monitoring for smart cities.

“A smart city will integrate information and communication technology together with various physical devices all connected via the Internet of Things to optimise its efficiency of operations and services in real time and its sustainability with minimal interruption through life-cycle management,” Chang said.

“Structural Health Monitoring Technology will play a key role in sustaining and maintaining the operation and safety of the smart cities,” he added.

"Inspections with built-in smart sensors to provide real-time assessment of the integrity of critical assets in operation are essential for smart cities," Chang said.

The International Conference on Structural Health Monitoring and Engineering Structures  promotes cooperation between international scientists and engineers from a large number of disciplines involved in research related to these topics.

The conference covered industrial engineering applications of the topics, including theoretical and analytical methods, numerical simulations, and experimental techniques.

It attracted nearly 70 scholars from domestic and international universities. Presentations at the conference will be published on Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering from global publisher Springer. VNS