Alfred Vanderpuije, Mayor of Accra, Ghana

By Alfred Vanderpuije

This week at the World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town, leaders will come together to discuss Africa’s future. One of the three focus themes is the importance of ‘Strategic Infrastructure’ as a foundation for the continent’s growth. As Mayor of Accra and Chief Executive of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, I would say that there are few areas as crucial for infrastructure investment as cities.

Buoyed by an emerging oil and gas industry and a rapidly growing consumer class, Ghana’s economy is one of the fastest growing in the world. Investors are flocking to the country’s capital Accra to take advantage of new business opportunities and become part of this success story. Mastercard recently identified Accra as one of Africa’s top cities in terms of economic growth potential over the next few years. Local and foreign firms are also driving a number of urban development opportunities such as Ghana Cyber City, King City and Appolonia City which aim to set up modern, high-tech hubs within and around Accra.

I welcome these initiatives, however, at the top of my agenda is Accra itself and the transformation of its existing systems and services for the benefit of its citizens and businesses. The truth is we cannot look to Accra’s future opportunities, without looking into the challenges of today.

Accra’s existing infrastructure is being put under increasing strain by an influx of new residents – the city’s population has expanded by over 1 million people – a 35 percent increase in the past decade alone. As we cannot, and will not, put a wall around the city to restrict the arrival of new residents, we can expect this trend to continue.

We must therefore act today to ensure that the city’s systems – from transportation, to water, sanitation, energy, healthcare, public safety, education and administration – are able to accommodate and cope with this influx of new residents.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For instance, today nearly all transportation in Accra is by road, but 70 percent of the vehicles carry only 30 percent of the people – a trend which causes significant traffic jams during peak hours.

Accra also suffers from perennial flooding problems and in 2011 there was extensive loss of life due to flash floods within the city. These problems highlight the extensive modernization required to our sanitation and storm water systems.

At the heart of many of these problems is our inability to finance projects to maintain and transform Accra. The reality is, my Metropolitan Assembly struggles to raise enough revenue for city services due to out-of-date revenue collection systems, tax evasion and fraud.

The government of Ghana and the Accra Metropolitan Assembly are already taking steps to address these challenges. Recently, Ghana’s President, John Dramani Mahama, launched the National Urban Policy Framework and Action Plan to promote the sustainable development of Ghanaian cities and towns. In Accra, we have put in place the Millennium Cities Initiative to raise the standard of living and we are beginning the transformation of many of the city’s systems. The Accra Sanitary Sewer and Storm Water Drainage Alleviation Project, supported by the U.S. government, also stands to improve waste water treatment for the city’s four million residents.

We recognize we cannot do this work alone. We need to tap into expertise and experience from across public and private sectors and civil society, within Ghana and around the world. We also recognize that the infrastructure we are currently installing has to be designed to withstand the challenges of tomorrow. We must therefore turn to the latest technologies to ensure that our systems are optimized and smarter.

IBM recently offered its expertise to the Accra Metropolitan Assembly to help tackle some of the city’s most intractable problems. A team of IBM experts travelled to Accra last year to work alongside our own. Just last week the company presented me with a report which outlines some of the key challenges and possible solutions in areas such as transportation, city services and energy. I also met with Dr. Kamal Bhattacharya, Director of IBM Research-Africa who presented some interesting new solutions specially designed for Africa. 

We see great opportunity for technology in Accra. For example, in the area of revenue collection, we see potential to use mobile payment systems to enable citizens and small businesses to pay for their taxes and city services electronically. Once payment systems are digitized, it will become a lot easier for my administration to identify cases of tax underpayment or fraud.

In the area of transportation, we could also turn to mobile phone data to help us to understand how Accra’s residents move around the city and how we could use that data to enhance our transportation systems to avoid traffic bottlenecks and traffic jams. We have a number of mobile service providers active in Ghana who could act as partners for such work.

In the area of water and sanitation, we could use technology to help monitor and manage our drainage systems and predict possible cases of flooding.

Technology holds great potential in Accra. However, we also recognize that what makes a city safer and smarter are its people. We need to forge a better relationship with our citizens and increase their sense of responsibility for their city. Accra’s residents need to take an interest in caring for the city. Nearly every one of our residents has a mobile phone – this creates the perfect channel for reporting problems and threats to the city’s infrastructure.

Across Africa, cities are growing quickly – economically and demographically. In Accra we need to embrace technologies and show leadership to ensure that our city is not left behind.

Technorati Tags: africa, Big Data, Ghana, IBM Smarter Planet, mobile computing, smarter analytics, Smarter Transportation, WEF 2013

Deepak Advani, General Manager, Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure, IBM

By Deepak Advani

The Internet Age has made it possible for dramatic amounts of information to be available at our fingertips. And as capacity expands and accessibility grows, we push ever closer to the  Internet-of-things, where our physical and digital worlds are tightly coupled and leveraged.

With the ability to generate, share, store and access increasing amounts of data – Big Data – the challenge soon becomes one of management and analysis. Left alone, the mountains of seemingly disparate information are useless. But when mined intelligently, they become treasure troves of insight that can unlock benefits, such as improved customer service, equipment-saving predictive maintenance, and new business opportunities, to name a few.

Take for example, the second largest commodity rail carrier in the European Union, PKP Cargo. The company manages 63,000 wagons and 2,400 locomotives that transport more than 110 million tons of cargo every year. PKP Cargo offers one-stop logistical services that include 10 multi-system locomotives, ensuring continuous journeys along routes electrified by more than one system. These trains and wagons are used for international transport in Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria and Belgium. On average, the company runs about 1,000 trains a day, servicing several thousand customers.

The amount of data being generated and needing to be tracked was difficult for PKP to sift through. The company realized it wasn’t just the task of tracking their wagons and trains that was vexing; it was the lack of analytics that it could turn into actionable information. Through IBM Maximo Asset Management software, PKP can now better predict when and where cargo will arrive, making sure each train is on schedule and meeting customer expectations. Just as important as tracking their assets, analytics empowers more than 10,000 of PKP’s employees with information to make more intelligent decisions, which ultimately enables PKP to expand its business. By also tracking the usage of each physical asset, PKP is using IBM analytics to predict potential repairs before failures occur and to perform preventative maintenance on its rolling stock.

PKP’s use of analytics is not uncommon and neither is the concept of gleaning intelligence from data to create new opportunities. Consider Pakistan. The country is quickly outpacing its current power generation capacity, with energy consumption growing by almost 80 percent in the last 15 years. The Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) forecasts the country’s electricity demand will increase to around 40,000 megawatts (MW) by 2020. The country’s current power generation capacity is at 23,538 MW.

To meet these growing demands, Pakistan created its first hydroelectric power plant through its operator, Tenaga Nasional Bhd (TNB) Remaco. The recently-constructed $235 million plant will help meet Pakistan’s growing energy needs by adding an estimated net annual energy of 540 GWh to the national grid and enhance the hydro power generation capacity of Independent Power Producers (IPP) by 40 percent. The addition of this power source will replace about 135,000 tons of imported oil, reducing carbon emissions and saving Pakistan approximately US$100 million per year in fuel costs.

The inherent challenge, however, was managing the hydro plant operations in a way that could scale to meet business demands. Through IBM’s asset management software, TNB Remaco now employs a single, converged view of all energy data, as well as asset and service management data. That enables employees to identify problematic equipment and make better informed decisions that are critical to the operations of the plant

The moving parts of a hydroelectric plant or railroad system serve as good examples of how our world is dependent on the mechanics and operations of physical objects. But today, we can do more than just monitor these systems and machines. We can collect data from them and apply analytics to make better, more strategic decisions on how to use them. The next step will be finding ways to create “cognitive” systems that can learn, adapt and hypothesize answers.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Big Data analytics, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, PKP Cargo, smarter analytics, Smarter Transportation, smarter utilities

Timothy J. Wholey, Global Leader, Aerospace & Defense Industry, IBM Global Business Services

By Timothy J. Wholey

We live in a world that’s exploding with data. From smartphones and social networks, to airplane instrumentation and atmospheric readings, we capture more data, more quickly than ever before. It’s estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated on the planet every day.

This incredible amount of data creates challenges and opportunities for organizations, particularly in the aviation industry, because of the volume and variety of data it generates. Air traffic demand is expected to triple over the next 20 years, with passenger aircraft and fleets doubling during that time.

(First in a series in support of Big Data Week)

Companies must accelerate their transformation to become more competitive, create distinctive new services and have a flexible infrastructure that can accommodate growth.

Airbus A380

 Data and analytics are being used to rethink how aircraft is built from the electronics systems, instrumentation and its physical structure; how to more efficiently manage aircraft operations and more. Advanced analytics can help airlines increase sales and customer loyalty, even improve fuel management and efficiency.

Today’s aircraft are increasingly instrumented and intelligent machines, filled with networks of sensors, monitors and actuators that create, store and communicate data. An airplane can generate up to a half terabyte of data on a single flight. That data can be used to enhance services up and down the value chain – mining insights, expediting decision making, or providing feedback for new product and service design.

An example of this is seen in IBM’s work with Airbus, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of passenger airliners. The company has been tasked to help Airbus strategically transform its current fleet service offerings and develop new ones that will help airline customers take advantage of Big Data to increase operational efficiencies, manage fleets more effectively and improve customer service.

For aircraft operators and airlines, harnessing the data that a commercial aircraft generates and then analyzing and evaluating data patterns can result in things like improved aircraft operations, on-time performance, cost efficiencies and ultimately a better customer experience for those traveling.

In an environment where maintaining operational efficiencies are the table stakes, Big Data can provide an advantage. Aviation and aerospace organizations that challenge themselves to consistently drive insight will be able to use it to increase their competitiveness in the marketplace and even create new business opportunities and revenue streams.

Technorati Tags: aviation, Big Data, Big Data analytics, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, smarter analytics, Smarter Transportation

Terry F. Yosie, President and CEO of the World Environment Center

By Terry F. Yosie

Environmental issues are big, thorny problems. Scarcities in water, food and raw materials are too complex for any single company or non-governmental organization to solve on its own.  In order to make a difference, it’s necessary to collaborate with like-minded partners to achieve shared goals.

Collaboration is a normal feature of customer-supplier relationships, government-business partnerships and initiatives with universities and other partners. It’s also typical for organizations looking for new business models that can sustain profitability while addressing societal needs, natural resource management, product and service innovation, and differentiation of brand value, to name a few.  Collaboration can spur organizations to redefine their business purpose by utilizing society as another kind of R&D lab for innovation. 

Coca-Cola’s Global Water Strategy is a good example. Water is clearly essential to the company’s business – for its beverages and also for growing the agricultural products they need. The company instituted a global program to promote water resource sustainability. It set global strategic direction on water, established policy and requirements, and formed and managed key partnerships with organizations such as the WWF and USAID.

Another example is IBM’s work with cities in emerging economies such as Africa. It requires years of building on-the-ground relationships and capabilities while turning projects into partnerships that generate positive economic, environmental and social results. IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge – the company’s single largest philanthropic initiative — deploys teams of employees to work with cities around the world to deliver detailed recommendations addressing key urban issues identified by local elected officials and other stakeholders. A recent report, “A Vision for Smarter Growth: an IBM Smarter Cities Report on Accra, Ghana” highlights how this rapidly emerging West African city should turn to technology to transform key city systems such as transportation and energy.

Many companies are still finding their footing as they try to build global collaboration to match their global business strategies. This requires a “system-level” understanding of societal and environmental changes that can transform global economy and society. At the World Environment Center, we’re seeing more companies beginning to recognize how issues such as population growth, urbanization, food security and natural resource management may affect their business and impact return on investment.

Such decisions rarely occur in a vacuum. For example, investment decisions to upgrade power generation should take into account interconnected energy and water use in building design and maintenance. Only a “system-level” understanding of goals will enable companies to develop more innovative approaches to understanding both customer and societal needs.

For collaboration to succeed on a larger scale, we need global networks of companies, national agencies, NGOs and foundations, such as those created to eradicate malaria. Organizations can jointly develop licensing standards and transparency practices. They can work towards specific goals, performance metrics, and accountable behaviors to make a difference — from individual projects, to Big Bang transformational initiatives.

Collaboration is key to developing solutions to the mounting global challenges of current and future generations.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, Earth Day, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, Public Health, Smarter Planet, sustainability

Mitzie Hunter, CEO, Greater Toronto CivicAction Alliance

By Mitzie Hunter

Like many city-dwellers worldwide, residents of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) have reached an impasse. Our congestion problems are getting worse and worse, and we now have some of the longest commuting times in North America. Congestion is not only taking a toll on our economy and our environment, but also on our health and our quality of life.

IBM’s Social Sentiment Index research pulled tens of thousands of tweets about traffic from five major cities across Canada. The exercise homed in on what our residents feel is most important—not surprisingly, Toronto’s commuters were the most active to vent their opinions. Toronto had 10,000 tweets about traffic over an 11-month period, 40 percent of which were explicitly negative. By contrast, only 20 percent of tweets in Halifax were negative.

In the GTHA, through CivicAction’s Your32 campaign, we’ve been reaching out to all commuters—drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, and transit users—to learn what a better transportation system would mean to them. We’ve been driving people to our website, your32.com, and to twitter, and asking a simple question: “What would you do with 32?” Thirty-two represents the number of minutes, on average, commuters in the region will save if the approved transportation plan, The Big Move, is funded and built over the next 25 years. The Big Move is the region’s plan for an improved, fully connected transportation system across the GTHA.

Through their responses, people have been painting a picture of the human cost of congestion—the toll congestion is taking on our lives by sucking away the time we could otherwise be spending on the things that matter. Things like eating healthy meals, going to the gym, or spending time with our families.

But we’re also finding that people are inspired by the idea of what a better system could bring: time to finish that novel they’ve been working on for years, to learn a new language, to take on a new hobby, or to explore more of what our amazing region has to offer.

When it comes to solving our congestion problems, smarter transportation is part of the solution. Employers can play their part by offering staff incentives for carpooling and taking transit, or by being open to flexible hours and telecommuting.  Smart commute networks can also help employers promote smarter commuting choices. New technologies and demand management mechanisms, from computer modeling, to crowd-sourcing, to intelligent traffic lights must also play a role – and we’re sure to see new and exciting innovations in the decades to come to maximize our road capacity and our transit system.

Many cities are exploring these opportunities now. But while these technologies can play a role in solving our congestion woes, what we need more than anything is better physical infrastructure. Transportation infrastructure in Canadian cities—and especially in the GTHA—has been chronically underfunded for decades. We’ve far exceeded the capacity of our current network, and with the estimated nearly three million people—a population the size of greater Montreal—moving into the GTHA over the next 25 years, things will only get worse. Unless we start building now  the upgraded, expanded, multimodal system that we need to make up for lost time and to plan for the future.

Fixing any city’s congestion crisis won’t happen overnight; it will take time, money and commitment to make up for decades of neglect and delay. But the need to act has never been so clear, and the cost of inaction has never been so high.

As we act, we should be guided by an overriding vision of smarter networks that better connect us to the places we want to go, and that provide us with more choice in how we get there. New technologies and attitudinal changes are part of the answer, but unless the public and decision-makers accept that we all have to pay for a better system, to build the new infrastructure that we need, the human cost of congestion will affect us for generations to come. While we continue to innovate and design a better future, it’s time to get moving on building The Big Move.

Join the conversation in the GTHA: visit your32.com, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, Crowd Sourcing, IBM Smarter Planet, IBM Smarter Transportation, IBM Social Sentiment Index, innovation, smarter analytics, smarter traffic, social media, social sentiment, Toronto

Angel Petisco, CIO, Miami-Dade County

By Angel Petisco

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, Big Data analytics, IBM Smarter Planet, Miami-Dade County, Smarter Cities, Smarter Transportation

Sylvie Spalmacin-Roma, Vice President, Smarter Cities, IBM Europe

By Sylvie Spalmacin-Roma

If you run over a pothole or perhaps a train is delayed on your morning commute, what do you do? It’s unlikely that you would pick up the phone to call the city to report it or attend a meeting on the topic being held by your local government.  The more likely scenario is that you would take to social media to mention the location of the pothole or express your frustration with the delay.

Today’s citizens can be seen as engaged but in a very different manner.  Twitter, Facebook and other social channels serve as a 24/7 town hall meeting for an increasing number of us digitally connected citizens.  Social listening and analysis can be a valuable tool for cities.

People are passionate about their commute. Love it or hate it, we have much to say  about it. The most recent IBM Social Sentiment Index looks at sentiment in traffic around several European cities in France, Netherlands, Spain and Germany.

Click on the image above to launch an infographic with the social sentiment findings.

For example, in the city of Lyon, France, sentiment around rush hour is positive (40%) with essentially no negative sentiment on the same topic.  The city has begun an ambitious project to improve mobility in the region and build a more sustainable transportation network, which I have written about in the past. This suggests that citizens are recognizing the efforts of the city of Lyon L’Optimod project to improve mobility.

Montpellier county, France, has recently announced an investment revisiting urban management to better serve their citizen in an open innovative way. Taking into account high negative sentiment around rush hour, accidents and weather could help the city better deploy resources and funding towards areas that are important to its citizens.

Each citizen has a unique voice and opinion about a critical issue or how to improve city services.

You can imagine how a city could use this data to make cities more attractive and livable.

Technorati Tags: commute, Facebook, IBM, social media, transportation, twitter

Ed Cole, Executive Director, Transit Alliance of Middle Tennessee

By Ed Cole

Earlier this year, the New York Times ran an article in which it called Nashville, Tennessee – the “it” city.

The coverage was an exciting and complimentary tribute to Nashville as a culturally-rich, fast growing metropolitan region. The Times highlighted the culture with music and trendy restaurants, and the economic health of the region attributing that in part to our, “mix of employers in fields like health care management, religious publishing, car manufacturing and higher education, led by Vanderbilt University.”

For all the accolades in the Times piece, there was mention of a very real problem in our “it” city – the need for better transportation. 

How are we going to get to enjoy all the city has to offer, the live music venues, the parks, the museums, or the chic social gatherings, if our roadways are choking with congestion?      

We welcome the growth of our region, but we have to be smart about it too.

The need for a better transportation system is not just about reducing the headaches of gridlock on the highways. Improving transportation is about improving our lives and changing culture. If you study the history of transportation from horses to trains, and from street cars to airplanes, then you realize that the changes in modes of transportation changed lives, altered communities and economic growth. 

Our region is dealing with the effects of rapid growth on our sprawling transportation network including some of the longest commute times in the U.S. This is among the reasons that we engaged IBM to help determine what type of investments could most benefit the region.

Five strategic areas emerged – two of which revolve around using Big Data to drive improvements in the transportation system. Using technology to combine and sift through transportation data for actionable insight means that the region can move from reacting to anticipating and avoiding many of the daily transportation issues their commuters face.

The report also provided high impact, short-term and long-term recommendations, which you can read here. At the Transit Alliance, we’re using this to help plan for future transit alternatives that are safer and smarter.  

Specifically, bus rapid transit (BRT) was identified as one of the most important steps for Nashville, which supports our work and the Mayor’s plan for “The East-West Connector.” 

The East-West Connector, a bus rapid transit route from Five Points in East Nashville through downtown to White Bridge Road in West Nashville, is a great example of how we’re working towards a more transportation options.  

Across Middle Tennessee we are seeing an increase in the use of mass transit options already available to us. Ridership on the MTA has grown significantly. The MTA’s free “Music City Circuit” downtown is very popular with those who live and work in the area, as well as tourists.  More and more riders are using the train, “Music City Star” between outer communities and downtown Nashville. 

These are steps in the right direction for transportation in the region, but we know there are many more ways we can improve. The IBM study recommends several plans for reducing commute times, creating better access to public transit, and cost efficient transportation. 

But most importantly, these new options for mass transit are improving our quality of life, making it safer and smarter to enjoy our “it” city.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, innovation, Nashville, smarter analytics, Smarter Planet, Smarter Transportation

Naveen Lamba, Global Smarter Transportation leader, IBM Global Business Services

By Naveen Lamba

Circling for a parking spot, worrying about feeding the parking meters, and ultimately wondering if you should just turn around and go home. These are familiar feelings for anyone who has ever had to find a parking spot in a hurry. Not only is it frustrating, but the time spent looking for parking also contributes to traffic congestion – some research suggests 30 percent on average – and air pollution.

Parking is an area of transportation that had seen little innovation until a just a few years ago. With today’s technology – from sensors to smarter meters to advanced analytics – cities can reinvent parking to help reduce congestion and make our cities more livable. 

Enter Streetline, a Silicon Valley start-up that provides Smart Parking solutions to cities, garages, airports, universities and other private parking providers. The company is the creator of Parker™, a free smartphone app that guides drivers to available parking spaces in real time.

The company won the 2010 IBM SmartCamp, a global entrepreneurship program that identifies early stage start-ups in the Smarter Planet industries. Through this program, Streetline had access to a global network of experts and advisors. Since then, Streetline and IBM have continued working together.

(Next week IBM will host the 2013 Global SmartCamp Finals in New York City.)  

Now, IBM and Streetline are joining together on a Smarter Parking pilot project in Birmingham, England, with Amey, an infrastructure company that works with the Birmingham City Counsel to maintain the city’s roads. 

With a population of over one million and 160,000 thousand people commuting to the city daily, Birmingham officials want to relieve the traffic congestion that is impacting the economy, local businesses, and citizens. Analytics software will help Birmingham understand its parking patterns so it can better manage congestion, improve parking efficiency and make it easier to find parking in the city’s Jewelry Quarter.

Ultra low power wireless sensors have been implanted into the road surface of existing parking spaces in an initial 10-block area of the city. These sensors detect the presence of a vehicle and transmit the data, which is collected and analyzed in real-time. This information is then made available to both the city transport authority and drivers.

Drivers who download Streetline’s Parker app can check on parking availability via their computers or mobile devices. Drivers can also see pricing, pay for parking using their mobile phone (where available), and get guidance back to their car when they finish their activity.  A voice-guidance system and hands-free feature encourages safe operation while driving.

Combining information management and advanced analytics from IBM with data gathered from parking sensors and applications from Streetline will give a view into what parking is like in the area by analyzing factors such as hourly occupancy, occupancy by block, parking duration, and trends in a particular neighborhood or business district.

“After a great experience as a SmartCamp winner, we are delighted to be teaming up with IBM and Amey to expand our Smart Parking services into the U.K. and to deliver compelling solutions for cities and consumers,” said Zia Yusuf, CEO of Streetline. “By providing Birmingham drivers with solutions like Parker by Streetline, we’re working together as a team to help solve one of the most pressing concerns facing our cities today – parking.”

With the smarter parking solution in place,Birminghamcould better manage the supply and demand of parking, as well as help the local chamber of commerce determine the best parking and transportation mix for a local shopping district to increase foot traffic. It could be connected with payment systems, to allow drivers to access travel data, plan their journey and then upon arrival at a free space, have the convenience of cashless payment.

IBM UK Smarter Cities leader Nigel Milton, who has worked with the City of Birmingham on this project and others, says “this Smarter Parking trial, which follows close on the heels of an IBM Smarter Cities Challenge grant, puts Birmingham one step closer to its goal to exploit the latest advances in technology for the benefit of its citizens and to improve city services.”

All of this adds up to easier and less frustrating parking for drivers and it’s one more step to a smarter city.

Technorati Tags: anaytics, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, mobile applications, mobile computing, smarter parking, smarter traffic, Smarter Transportation

Today, thanks to deep analytics, we can for the first time understand the complexities of cities in motion.

IBM Researchers have developed analytics software that provides accurate and meaningful information about massive numbers of peoples’ movements. These insights can be used by city managers to plan new transit routes, improve the efficiency of current transit systems, and coordinate the various transportation modes with a goal of making moving around in cities a lot more convenient and comfortable. The project, Insights in Motion, is a so-called First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) collaboration with transportation officials in Dubuque, Iowa, and Istanbul, Turkey.

A paper about Dubuque’s piece of the project, Dubuque Smart Travel, was presented Jan. 16 at the annual meeting of the  Transportation Research Board.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Until now, city officials based their knowledge of transportation activities on a wide variety of information–including everything from trip and ticket sales data, to surveys of transit passengers, to actual counts of people on a particular bus or subway car at a particular time in a particular place. The problem is, all of these types of information only provide fragments of the bigger picture. A survey of people on a particular bus route, for instance, only tells you about the people who are riding the bus–not about people who are moving in the same direction at the same time via other means who might ride the bus under other circumstances.

The Insights in Motion technology draws on transit data, geo-spacial information, census records, points-of-interest information and data from cell phones and smart phones. The telephone data is completely anonymous so no individual’s privacy is compromised. By tracking the movements of thousands of people from place to place and correlating it with time and the speed of travel, the system understands the mode of transportation people are using and knows where they’re traveling to and from–whether its home, work, school or shopping. For city planners, it’s a revelation. “It’s like a blind person for the first time opening their eyes and seeing,” says Milind Naphade, leader of the IBM Research project.

The project got its start because IBM Research scientists were looking for a real city in which to test their Smarter Planet technology ideas. The small but aspiring Mississippi River town of Dubuque agreed to become a living laboratory for experiments. One of the goals there was to increase the use of the public bus system, so Naphade and his colleagues proposed developing a system for analyzing the transportation needs of a small city. They applied within IBM Research to make Dubuque Transit a FOAK program, jointly funded by IBM and a client. They were asked to also choose another city, a larger one in an emerging market, and ultimately, they picked Istanbul.

So they had two living laboratories that are as different as you can imagine: a small city with just 23,000 households and only one source of public transit, buses; and a sprawling city with 14 million residents, 1 million tourists annually, and a wide range of transit options–subway, light rail, express buses, traditional buses, minibuses and ferries.

They started in Dubuque. In addition to gathering mobile phone location data (with no personal information included) from telecom carriers, they also recruited 1,000 volunteers who own smart phones. The high-end handhelds are equipped with GPS and accelerometers, which makes it possible to track the volunteers as they travel around the city with pinpoint location and speed-of-movement accuracy.

Their task was challenging. They had to build a system that could, in a sense,”understand” what a city is, what people are, what people do, and how they move from place to place. They needed a digital model of a city that they could experiment with.  They built a framework of knowledge about each individual’s activities, including detecting meaningful locations, segmenting trips, calculating the duration of stay, identifying the purpose of each trip, plotting origins and destinations of each trip, tracking the time of day, and specifying the mode of transportation. They even estimated the carbon footprint of each trip. Then they aggregated all of the information about individuals to generate city-wide statistics.

The team used the results to optimize the routes and schedules for the city’s bus transit system. The objective was to minimize the sum of operator costs, user costs and unsatisfied demand costs for the entire network. Costs aren’t just expressed in dollars. For users of the system, for instance, they include factors like waiting, walking and driving a car. Dubuque is now trying the information out on two pilot projects–new bus routes it didn’t operate before. “Having the data is crucial. You don’t have to operate on tea leaves,” says Chandra Ravada, director of the transportation department for Iowa’s East Central Intergovernmental Association. “You know where people are going. You can change things based on that. You’re designing your system not on somebody’s opinion but based on facts.”

Naphade and his team took the lessons learned in Dubuque and applied them in Istanbul. Their task there was way more complex. There were so many more people and modes of transportation. Also, in Istanbul, they didn’t track volunteers with Smart Phones. They had to rely on less precise records from regular mobile phones. But the technologies they had used in Dubuque also worked in Istanbul. The city’s transit authority is using the Insights in Motion tool to help design feeder bus routes connecting to the cities new subway lines. The goal is to reduce operating expenses by 40%, meet 37% more demand, reduce average commuter time by 60% and reduce per-traveler combustion emissions by 40%.

At the highest level, Naphade believes that Insights in Motion has tremendous potential to alter the relationships of cities and their citizens. “One thing I think about is how we have become slaves of the infrastructure rather than having the infrastructure work for us,” he says. “Cities should help people live their lives, not get in the way.”

Technorati Tags: Dubuque, FOAK, IBM Research, Istanbul