The ability to manage a crisis better by predicting emergency needs and deploying resources accordingly is already a reality for Rio de Janeiro, which earlier this year set up an Intelligent Operations Center using computer programs that rely on algorithms developed by I.B.M. And more cities are expected to follow suit soon.
“We now have a hub for information on anything that has an impact on the city’s day-to-day life,” said Carlos Roberto Osorio, Rio’s secretary for conservation and public services. “With this system, the information is treated quickly and the response is much faster. So the city becomes more intelligent, it becomes more agile and at the end of the day it becomes a safer city for our citizens.”
Guruduth Banavar, vice president and chief technology officer of the global public sector unit at I.B.M., said computer algorithms helped to analyze complicated data that the human brain alone cannot sort through. “These algorithms, collectively called analytics, can use past historical and current data in a given situation to predict the most likely scenario that will develop and suggest the best way to react to the current event,” he said.
“Analytics is about using information to decide how to best react to current events and how to best plan for what is likely to happen in the future.”
Mr. Osorio said that Rio’s center had helped cut the city’s response time to emergencies by 30 percent, on average. “We have now become much more reliable in term of preventing events,” he said. “With this system we can mitigate the impact before it happens. This means the level of stress in the city and the level of risk to our citizens are greatly diminished.”
He said the cost of starting the center was 25 million real, or about $14 million.
Analytics can help cities move from uncertainty — or knowing events may occur but having no further knowledge to act on — to risk quantification, which in turn allows for the development of business continuity plans and other contingency planning, and action, said David McCloskey, a partner in Deloitte Analytics.
“The next step for analytics to help cities respond to a crisis is to build capabilities that provide effective risk mitigation,” Mr. McCloskey said. For example, using system modelling to develop programs that could read information from sensors to tell when electricity transmission networks are threatened by wildfires and then close off or reroute power, or using predictive analytics from sifting voluminous crime reports to improve police visibility in problem areas.
Deloitte has developed a smartphone application called Bamboo that harnesses analytics to aid in the effective functioning and continuance of operations after a crisis occurs. The program is mainly aimed at corporations, but it could also be used at the municipal level, Mr. McCloskey said.
Eric Wood, an analyst at Pike Research, a market research and consulting firm on clean energy technology, said “smart cities” are those that are able to shift from being just reactive to being proactive, based on the use of better information. Such cities use the data to make their operations more efficient but also to improve their responsiveness to emergencies and critical incidents.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/business/global/raising-the-iq-of-city-services.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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