ANALYSING THE FUTURE OF CITIES
Since 2008, IBM has been helping organisations large and small, in emerging and mature markets, to build a Smarter Planet by infusing intelligence into the way the world literally works – into systems, processes and infrastructure.
IBM helps city and industry leaders increase the vitality and competitiveness of urban environments with solutions that can optimise the entire city, improve the quality and efficiency of services, and reduce waste and expense associated with inefficient processes and uncoordinated, duplicated execution.
With insight from more than 2,000 smarter cities projects, IBM has developed the expertise and capabilities to help cities of all sizes become smarter. Smarter cities are using technology to enable new models for leadership that can help drive sustainable economic growth. They are leveraging information to make better decisions, anticipating problems to resolve them proactively, and coordinating resources to operate effectively.
In 2010, IBM announced a research collaboratory in Singapore, where researchers from IBM will work closely with scientists and researchers from the Singapore government through agencies such as EDB and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) to improve the quality of the country’s urban services by developing decision support tools and more effectively model, predict and manage the use of natural and physical infrastructure resources – including water, transport and energy.
The collaboratory focuses on research in advanced analytics-based solutions. The understanding of water, energy and transport systems requires science-based models of resources (e.g. hydrology for water) and behaviour (e.g. economic models for demand response for electricity and transport). These models need to assimilate data from sensor networks at the right scale and resolution to capture the observed events and the interaction between the different systems. Such models may be used to understand the behaviour and develop policies for the management of these systems.
One of the first projects is in collaboration with the LTA on smarter transport to mitigate traffic congestion. The research builds upon the work done by IBM Research to provide traffic prediction and aims to provide decision support analytics for improved traffic management.