Digital transformation can improve your City Resilience Index

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"City resilience reflects the overall capacity of a city (individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems) to survive, adapt, and thrive no matter what kinds of chronic stresses or acute shocks they experience." (Rockefeller Foundation: 2013)

To help quantify a city’s resilience capability, Arup and the Rockefeller Foundation partnered to develop the City Resilience Index (CRI), a quantitative measure of this capacity.

To learn more about Digital Transformation solutions that can help you improve your City Resilience Index, please visit our Infrastructure website.

The CRI provides a holistic articulation of city resilience, structured around four dimensions, 12 goals, and 52 indicators that are critical to measuring the resilience of our cities.

When most people think about city resilience, their minds often turn to topics like sustainable design, city planning, redundant infrastructure, and emergency management services.

While these topics are critically important and rightfully reflected in the City Resilience Index, there is another category of indicators that contribute to the CRI that is often initially overlooked. These indicators relate to how a city manages its day-to-day operations, how they maintain their infrastructure, how they collaborate/communicate across departments and functions, and how multi-stakeholder decisions are taken.

Recently, London mayor Sadiq Khan announced the UK capital’s first-ever resilience strategy, which was developed as part of the global 100 Resilient Cities Project. The strategy highlights new threats to the city’s safety and stability, including extreme weather events that lead to flooding and drought.

Among the areas of focus in London’s strategy are more effective and sustainable use of water to address drought conditions; better-coordinated response to emergency conditions and terrorist attacks; innovative use of data to maintain London’s interlinked infrastructure; and improved cybersecurity.

City resilience in action

At AVEVA, we work every day with megacities like London, as well as smaller municipalities with populations as small as 50,000 or fewer, who are looking to leverage technology to help improve their sustainability and resilience.

Below are five examples where cities were able to either improve their sustainability and resilience or maintain the current levels of resilience while lowering their overall cost of operations and man-hours to deliver to the expected service levels.

  • The city of Nava Raipur proudly proclaims itself as India’s first greenfield smart city. Designed and built from the ground up with the latest technology innovations, Nava Raipur has implemented a centralized command and control center which can streamline communications, improve collaboration, and make multi-stakeholder decision-making faster and more informed. Built on AVEVA’s Unified Operations Center software, Nava Raipur’s control center integrates its smart governance system, intelligent transport system, utility management system, city surveillance system, intelligent building management system, and smart network and data center through a ’single-pane-of-glass’ interface.

  • Anglian Water’s implementation of an Integrated Leakage and Pressure Management (ILPM) solution has helped this UK water utility increase its sustainability and deal with drought conditions and water scarcity by reducing water waste. The system can detect leaks, and even predict, their location so the utility can respond proactively based on data analytics, instead of waiting for a service interruption to alert it to a potential problem. By minimizing water leakage, Anglian Water can ensure that more of its treated water reaches customers, allowing the company to treat less and preserve more of the natural resources available to its community.

  • Approximately 40% of our total energy use comes from heating, cooling, and operating buildings. So, when the City of Bremen in Germany was looking to standardize the way it manages the buildings within its purview to reduce energy consumption, it sought to implement a common building management system for all of its properties. By centralizing building control and implementing best practices among all property managers, Bremen could save between 15 and 18 percent on its annual power bills, effectively lowering the overall carbon footprint of the city.

  • In the City of Toronto, officials wanted to make sure they were maintaining their critical water infrastructure as efficiently as possible. This included making sure they managed their spare parts and maintenance inventory so they always had the right parts to keep their systems running, but didn’t waste money by overstocking redundant or non-critical parts. By implementing Enterprise Asset Management software, the City of Toronto ensures that water and wastewater staff have readily available, accurate, and relevant information to help them be more effective in executing the work management process, whether during day-to-day operations or when a critical emergency arises.
  • Also worried about how they maintain critical utility infrastructure, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) implemented a risk-based maintenance strategy to assess which of its infrastructure was most critical and warranted the greatest focus from its asset optimization strategy. Using our asset libraries, with 20 years of reliability data, AVEVA helped the SFPUC perform the analysis and implement its findings. Our recommendations addressed the most critical risks and maintenance issues and predict that SFPUC will benefit from a 25 percent reduction of maintenance hours every year while maintaining the same service levels and recovery times it experienced prior to the optimization.

These projects rely on digital transformation to provide operational improvement and enhanced intelligence. But with increased connectivity and data-sharing, cities must also be vigilant to ensure their data systems are secure from cyber-attack.

At AVEVA, we design our software solutions to all the latest cybersecurity standards, keep our customers constantly aware of known vulnerabilities and corrective actions, and partner with security ICS industry leaders like Cylance. We also work very closely with the Industrial Cybersecurity Services organization at our strategic partner Schneider Electric to ensure the cities and infrastructure providers we work with have addressed all of their cybersecurity needs.

To learn more about Digital Transformation solutions that can help you improve your City Resilience Index, please visit our Infrastructure website.

 

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