At a conference organized by the municipal administration to announce the plan, the city's leaders said they wants to make Da Nang smart in six major areas: administration, economics, traffic, environment, life-quality and citizens.

The city will also develop smart systems for education, healthcare, food safety, tourism, agriculture, trading, drainage, waste management, traffic and security.

It will build a center for operational monitoring, smart public services and open data whereby it is freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without copyright restrictions patents or other mechanisms of control.

Investments for this smart city project will come from private investors and public private partnerships, officials said at the conference.

Once it achieves its target in 2030, the city can synchronize itself with the smart city network in Vietnam and beyond, in Southeast Asia, they added.

A city of around 1.2 million, Da Nang has been preparing the smart city project for several years.

Last month, it opened the first phase of its information technology (IT) park modeled on the U.S.’s Silicon Valley.

Aiming to become one of the most developed IT communities in Asia, the park has already attracted some big names in the global IT industry like IBM, Cisco, Intel, KDDI and Mitsui.

In February, it was announced that the city would sign contracts with Singapore’s Sakae Corporate Advisory and Surbana Jurong to make adjustments to its urban planning.

It said the plans would have to include solutions to tackle key problems like infrastructure overload, climate change response and environmental protection.

In April last year, the city inked deal with Vietnamese tech giant FPT to build websites and systems digitalize basic services like healthcare and traffic management for local residents.

Da Nang is the urban hub in central Vietnam and is considered the country's third most important city, after Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The city licensed 135 foreign direct investment projects worth almost $286 million last year.