Cities are dotted with numerous outdoor signs, distributed along streets, alleys, and building facades. Traditionally, manual on-site inspections have led to low detection efficiency, delayed detection of safety hazards, and unclear facility records. Putuo District in Shanghai is actively exploring digital management throughout the entire lifecycle of outdoor signage, implementing an innovative supervision model of "one plate, one code, one file." Each compliant outdoor sign is equipped with a dedicated electronic ID card, integrating approval declarations, safety inspections, responsible parties, and maintenance records into the online archive. This has promoted the post-management of signage security management toward proactive prevention and set a model for digital governance of urban signage nationwide.

Under the traditional management model, thousands of storefronts and rooftop signs in the city are scattered across different departments, and many old signs have lost their approval documents. Supervisors need to personally visit the site to verify facility information, but old signs are rusty and electrical hazards make immediate detection difficult; After the sign falls and injuries occur, the process of tracking the responsible party becomes complicated. After merchants changed signs or relocated stores, the responsible parties failed to update them in time, further exacerbating confusion among management.

After implementing the "one plate, one code" model, each registered outdoor sign generates an independent QR code file. This archive comprehensively records signboard installation locations, dimensions, materials, light sources, design plans, approval and filing dates, property ownership, and maintenance unit information; Subsequently, security inspections and maintenance upgrades were carried out, and the relevant records have been updated to electronic files. Administrators can scan codes to access all data, and ordinary citizens can also scan to view basic information. If damage or vibration is found, they can report the issue online with one click.

Regulatory departments are equipped with drone patrols and AI image recognition technology, regularly inspecting key road sections and high-altitude roof signs. AI automatically identifies signs of damage, deformation, and lighting anomalies, generates work orders, and issues them to relevant units for rectification within the specified time, greatly improving the efficiency of hazard inspections. At the same time, local institutions have set up offline compliance guidance windows, compiled identification and transparent cards, popularized merchant standards and reporting procedures, lowered the barrier to understanding merchants, and guided market entities to proactively comply.

Digital supervision is also being reverse-engineered in the marking engineering industry. Identifying projects undertaken by companies requires detailed facility documentation, so services are no longer just about submitting a physical signage. Contractors need to keep structural drawings and material reports to assist clients in entering documents, which also requires the company to manage project data uniformly. For undeclared safety hazards with illegal labeling, the system will also issue warnings, forcing companies to choose qualified and legal construction service providers and reducing safety risks from unqualified small workshops.

Implementing the new model also faces practical challenges. The city has a large number of existing signage but lacks historical signage documents, all of which have been completed and documented, resulting in a huge workload; Some individual merchants lack willingness to cooperate and do not proactively update their identification responsibility information after store transfers; Some small temporary ads change rapidly, making document tracking even more difficult.

Industry urban governance researchers point out that the "one license, one regulation" policy is not only designed to increase the burden on enterprises and merchants but also to clarify safety responsibilities. Online storage of complete lifecycle data of signboards enables multi-party information sharing among regulators, merchants, and engineering companies. The experience gained from Shanghai's pilot is expected to be adopted by more cities in the future, and digital regulation will become an important development direction for outdoor signage management in China.