Published on 27 Oct 2011
Validated on 13 May 2013
Customer:
City of Dubuque, Iowa
Industry:
Government
Deployment country:
United States
Solution:
Asset Management, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Cloud & Service Management, Development & Technology Adoption, IBM Research, Industry Framework , Information Integration, Service Management, Smart Work
Smarter Planet:
Smarter Cities, Smarter Government, Smarter Water
IBM Business Partner:
ESRI
Overview
City of Dubuque is a city of 60,000 citizens in the US state of Iowa. It was named the “most livable small city” in the country by the US Conference of Mayors in 2008. Dubuque has evolved into a major retail, medical, education and employment center with a strong commitment to innovation and citizen involvement.
Business need:
The City of Dubuque was committed to reducing its impact on the environment while still delivering the services its residents needed. The city and its citizens had limited insight into their water consumption and management, and as a result the city struggled to reduce water costs and its overall consumption footprint. Without accurate information on resource distribution and consumption, and a way to enlist the help of its citizens, the city found it difficult to act on its commitment to sustainability and to alter citizen behavior.
Solution:
Governments are increasingly striving to realize the economic as well as the environmental benefits that come from reducing energy and resource usage. To achieve these benefits, the City of Dubuque built a prototype platform for real-time sustainability monitoring that provides an integrated view of the city’s energy management. Monitoring water consumption every 15 minutes, the smarter meter system securely transmits that anonymous data along with information on weather, demographics and household characteristics to the cloud, where it is analyzed.
Benefits:
· Decreased water utilization during the pilot project by 89,090 gallons among 151 households over nine weeks—a 6.6 percent reduction
· Anticipated aggregate annual community-wide water savings across 23,000 households to be 64,944,218 gallons, or US$190,936
· Increased water leak detection by participating citizens at a rate of 8 percent compared to 0.98 percent citywide, a 716 percent increase
Video
Smarter Cities Sustainability Project - City of Dubuque, Iowa
A US city experiences a significant reduction in water consumption when it engages IBM Research, IBM Business Partner Esri in a Smarter Cities Sustainability project and numerous IBM software products to create a first-of-a-kind cloud-based, meter-driven solution that directly involves citizens in controlling water usage
Interviewees:
Roy Buol, Mayor, City of Dubuque
Dave Lyons, Project Manager, Smarter Sustainable Dubuque
Milind Naphade, Program Director, IBM Smarter City Services
Chris Kohlmann, Information Services Manager, City of Dubuque
Components
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Software:
Tivoli Access Manager for Business Integration, DB2 for Linux, UNIX and Windows, Cognos Business Intelligence, WebSphere Application Server