3 Methods to Optimize Urban Infrastructure | Data-Smart City Solutions

Decades of underinvestment in critical urban infrastructure have forced U.S. metropolitan areas right into a tight corner. Bridges, roads, aqueducts, sewer pipes — the infrastructure that helped drive the final 3 decades of growth is failing. They are driving economic growth, metropolitan areas have to manage complex, aging infrastructure efficiently and reinvest smarter.

Innovators in water infrastructure management are at the forefront with investments that empower metropolitan areas to make use of descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics to dynamically manage critical infrastructure.

1. Descriptive Analytics — Inspectors Equipped with Tablets

Descriptive analytics is about collecting and synthesizing data efficiently to produce a precise rendering of infrastructure assets. In water infrastructure management, developing up-to-date asset conditions is definitely an arduous task requiring continuous inventories of miles of ponds and streams. To chop lower on ineffective, paper-intensive inventories, managers are embracing GIS-integrated, tablet-based inspection tools.

The Santa Clara Valley Water District in Santa Clara County, Calif., manages a network of natural and man-made infrastructure that supplies 1.8 million residents with water. In order to go paperless, district field staff was equipped with GIS tablets to survey waterway infrastructure, cataloging and assessing the health of levees along with other assets. These data are actually given into the district’s asset keeper, allowing the company not only to see infrastructure conditions but to create smart decisions about future investments. Based on Esri, greater than 4,000 paperless inspections happen to be processed since 2012.

2. Predictive Analytics — High-Definition Rain

Predictive analytics enables managers to create smart decisions concerning the future by mixing a large number of data suggests create causal types of occasions. In Europe, four metropolitan areas are tinkering with X-band radar’s ability to predict flash floods by counting every raindrop included in the RainGain project. This innovation isn’t nearly weather reporting: Real-time quantified rain fall data can help metropolitan areas dynamically predict floods and deploy infrastructure to curb damage.

Rotterdam, within the Netherlands, is mainly below ocean level so the only method to take away the water is thru a network of mobile water pumps and storage basins. Scientists you will find running trials to link the actual-time predictions in the X-band radar towards the deployment water pumps and control over storage basins.

3. Prescriptive Analytics — Dynamic Optimization water Treatment Plants

Descriptive and predictive tools may be used to produce a system that analyzes data, diagnoses problems and instantly makes prescriptions to optimize infrastructure and maximize efficiency.

After decades of pricey inventories and generic maintenance schedules, Plusieurs Moines, Iowa, water treatment managers made the decision to embed meters, sensors and diagnostic equipment within the city’s treatment plant’s pumps and motors. Using automated logic controllers as well as an Infor EAM asset management system, these managers produced a method that may collect data on motor performance, evaluate it, identify inefficiencies and optimize the plant’s motors for optimum energy-efficiency. The guarana plant now uses 20 % less energy than ever before, and generates smart capital improvement schedules that improve operations.

We are able to see within the best ways in which the information infrastructure tools nowadays are helping governments whatsoever levels extend the existence and employ of older, classical infrastructure.