When an underground pipeline experiences a sudden anomaly, the operation control center 2 kilometers away can collect relevant data and issue an alarm within seconds, while pinpointing the location of the abnormal pipe. In complex situations, maintenance personnel can enter the underground utility tunnel directly from the entrance to carry out work, completely abandoning the old repair methods of digging up the road surface, closing roads for construction, and "cutting open the belly" of the street.

This scene will soon appear in the park of the 2019 China Beijing World Horticultural Exposition. Recently, the municipal infrastructure construction project for the 2019 Beijing Horticultural Expo, located in Yanqing, Beijing, officially broke ground. The underground utility tunnel project in the park, which adopts a three-compartment structure and has a total length of 3.34 kilometers, has become a highlight. In the future, heating, gas, water supply, reclaimed water, power, and telecommunications pipelines will all be incorporated into the tunnel, arranged along six main roads including the park's South Road, forming one main utility tunnel and five branch tunnels, connected and coordinated with surrounding underground pipelines.

"In the past, more than a dozen pipelines were buried directly under the same roadbed, with inspection openings set every few meters for personnel to enter and work. The limited road width inevitably resulted in many manhole covers," said Xu Hong, director of the Overall Planning Department of the Beijing Horticultural Expo Bureau. All this will change in the park, she said: "There will be very few manhole covers on the park's South Road at the Beijing Horticultural Expo, and the road appearance and riding comfort will be very different."

Once the underground utility tunnel is completed, it will not only concentrate previously separate pipelines into a unified tunnel for coordinated management, effectively ensuring the daily safety management and emergency maintenance of municipal pipelines, but also enhance the park's comprehensive carrying capacity and ensure the safety of park facilities and energy supply while beautifying the park landscape.

To ensure the safe, efficient, economical, and reliable operation of the underground utility tunnel project, the Beijing Horticultural Expo has introduced smart management into the utility tunnel project. Using technologies such as building information management, geographic information systems, cloud computing, and big data analysis, it has built a smart operation and maintenance management system platform integrating status monitoring, fault alarms, rapid response, and auxiliary strategy generation, achieving three-dimensional data display, informatized asset management, intelligent emergency response, and smart operation and maintenance management. At the same time, through energy-saving control and intelligent inspection, it reduces manual involvement in operation and maintenance management and lowers operation and maintenance costs.