Nevada, US: At Pulse 2011 conference in Las Vegas, IBM announced contracts with four cities: Cape Fear, North Carolina; Henderson, Nevada; Waterloo, Ontario; and Emirate of Abu Dhabi. They will use the company’s location-based analytics to repair eroding infrastructure as part of IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative.
IBM’s Tivoli business unit is leading the way in providing software to drive such initiatives, particularly with its Maximo software. Cities as part of such initiatives, around the globe, monitor and map systems using IBM Maximo Spatial software with geospatial information from IBM business partner Esri.
“Cities around the world are getting smarter everyday by monitoring and analysing the data in their streets, pipes and buildings,” said David Bartlett, Vice President of Industry Solutions at IBM. “We see that these real-time analytical technologies are driving a new level of intelligence that helps cities—big or small, new or old—to gain more efficient, sustainable operations.”
Abu Dhabi project
With the help of IBM Maximo software, Abu Dhabi Water & Electricity Authority (ADWEA) is transforming its organisation into a smarter utility to better track the performance of its assets and improve the quality and reliability of water and electricity for its customers.
To meet growing customer demand, ADWEA is expanding the automation, visibility and control of its operations through several projects, including connecting its corporate GIS and some of the control systems to IBM Maximo software. For example, if a transformer trips or there is a water main leakage, embedded sensors will be able to relay that information to IBM Maximo, which automatically generates a work order.
Henderson project
Henderson’s infrastructure continues to grow. Hence, it has needed to bring more efficiency and visibility into the city’s equipment and services. To address this, the city of Henderson added real-time geospatial intelligence capabilities to its existing city management solution, enabling officials to capture, analyse and display assets and locations. Working with IBM and business partner Esri, the city’s new solution delivers daily work orders and service requests associated with assets mapped in the GIS that help define the scope of work required, such as an inspection, vegetation management, or maintenance on city buildings and parking lots.
Cape Fear project
With the new IBM smarter water system, Cape Fear officials can now map nearly 1,500 miles of main lines and 143 pump stations to see in real time the county’s water and sewer line problems, the company said. Managers and teams on location can then prioritize what issues to address first and better identify the source of such issues. Work orders are now automatically generated when out-of-norm conditions exist.
Waterloo project
IBM software is also at work in the city of Waterloo, a municipality located in southern Ontario and one of three cities in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo. With a population 120,000, the city of Waterloo has become the technology hub of Ontario.
The city of Waterloo recently deployed Maximo Spatial to geographically view and update all of the city’s water-related assets—from drinking water to storm and waste water and the facilities that make up the water department, IBM said. The city of Waterloo is leveraging location capabilities to create more efficiency in its system that services more than 120,000 users and more than 33,000 thousand assets, including gravity mains, manholes and pressurized mains.
Source: eWeek.com
