Cities Get Smarter with IBM’s Location-based Analytics

Cities Get Smarter with IBM’s Location-based Analytics:

IBM is announcing Smarter Cities projects in Wilmington, N.C., Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and new results from an IBM First-of-a-Kind Research project in Washington, D.C.  

Increasingly, cities are using location-based technology to bring efficiency to their operations and improve the customer experience. They are using IBM software to get both a bird’s eye view of their city infrastructure — roads, buildings and waterways — as well as insight into their operations underground or on the street of the pipes, wires, street lights, electrical meters, storm drains and other assets that make up a city’s infrastructure. Some cities are using embedded sensors to detect faulty pipes or broken streetlights to automatically generate a work order for maintenance staff.

“Cities around the world are getting smarter everyday by monitoring and analyzing the data in their streets, pipes and buildings,” said David Bartlett, vice president of Industry Solutions, IBM. “IBM is delivering a new level of intelligence that helps cities — big or small, new or old — to gain more efficient, sustainable operations.”

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Cities around the globe monitor and map their systems using IBM software with mapping and geographic information software (GIS) from IBM business partner Esri.  For example:

• With digital history delivered in real-time to smart phones, workers in the field can act quickly and efficiently to resolve — and even prevent — problems by seeing exactly where a water main is, and its relationship to other underground infrastructure.
• IBM analytics can uncover hidden relationships such as pinpointing the cause of reoccurring issues and pockets of inefficiency, such as one water main that causes expansive seasonal flooding to prevent issues before they impact service.  
• Repair crews address problems from a spatial perspective such as optimizing the driving route of their service trucks to reduce time on the road, prioritizing critical jobs and arming themselves with the detailed history of infrastructure to speed repairs.