WebFOCUS Keeps City Above Water, On Track for Future

Snapshot

Organization The city of Richmond, population 160,000, with an area of 50 square miles, built on a low island in the Fraser River immediately south of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

The Challenge City planners needed to analyze historical and trend data from water and sanitary pumps, which was locked in a proprietary database, to guide development and emergency response efforts.

The Strategy Create a wireless-enabled Web site from which city officials could retrieve reports about alerts, trends, pump status, and other information.

The Results Using inexpensive, open standards, the city has a system that provides the intelligence it needs to plan effectively for the future, can easily extend to new technologies, and be accessed from a wide variety of devices.

Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS and Web services from AvantGo, an Information Builders strategic partner.

The city of Richmond on Canada's west coast would be under water at times during the year if the drainage pumps operated by the city weren't constantly pumping water into the broad Fraser River, which encloses it on three sides. On the fourth side, the salt waters of Georgia Strait lap the city's shores. The city has an average elevation only one meter (three feet) above sea level.

Obviously, careful planning is essential. A leaky main or burst pipes spell trouble in a city where water can't drain downhill. Entire neighborhoods could be flooded if drainage systems are unable to meet the demands of new development or a heavy downpour. But where should new pumps be located? Which pumps are most vulnerable to breakdown? How much impact does a new shopping center, office building, or residential development have on drainage or water usage? When Richmond planners went to answer those questions they discovered that they had millions of lines of data, but very little useful intelligence.

Data Into Intelligence

The data comes from one of North America's largest supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. Radio transmitters at 180 pumps, temperature sensors, and river level monitors send status reports to a receiver on the top of a high hotel, which feeds it to a control room where alarm conditions such as failed pumps or power outages can be identified. Each week, the system collects more than 2 million records, which are stored in a proprietary database on a PC server running a real-time operating system.

To gain intelligence about this data, Richmond turned to WebFOCUS from Information Builders. WebFOCUS had two outstanding features that attracted Richmond: First, it was capable of tapping into the proprietary database in which all that data was stored and, unlike that database, WebFOCUS had powerful reporting and analysis capabilities. Second, WebFOCUS' ability to publish reports on the Web means the city can put that intelligence in the hands of anyone, including users of wireless devices. Today public works crews in the field or engineers in planning meetings can pull down useful intelligence about the city's infrastructure on PDAs.

That's a far cry from Richmond's earliest alert systems. In those days a siren would sound and a red light would flash until someone – usually a nearby resident – would call and report the alarm. The SCADA system improved the quality and timeliness of alerts by sending data about pump activity to a central dispatch station, but city planners still had no way to analyze most of the data the system collected. The new system allows any city official with access to the Web site, which is powered by WebFOCUS, to view recent alerts such as pumps experiencing mechanical failures, sanitary sewage tanks getting too full, or city streets approaching freezing temperatures. They also can view trend information, including how hard each pump is working, how often it has failed in the past, and how its load or activity changes after a downpour drenches the city or a new parking lot is paved in its area. Asked how Richmond assembled this information in the past, Edward Hung, manager of the city's Advanced Research and Technologies team, says, "We couldn't. We realized we have a great system for monitoring and control but it was weak on the reporting side. Something as simple as finding out how many alarms came in the night before would take a day."

The Wireless Connection

The WebFOCUS system quickly demonstrated that it could make sense of the data that the city collected. But Information Builders went well beyond the original scope of the project by advising city planners to make smart decisions about the future. Fred Lee, Information Builders' Technical Manager in nearby Vancouver, first raised the possibility of linking the data to handheld devices, such as PalmPilots, so that managers could take the data with them or access it over wireless networks. That, in turn, led to the vision of any city official or public works service crew having comprehensive data about the city's public works system, whether they were sitting in council chambers during a budget meeting or in a truck responding to a midnight alert in the dead of winter.

Considering the dramatic increase in the quality and availability of information it delivered, the WebFOCUS system was relatively inexpensive. The new database reporting system required only six weeks of development. The Web site has been in production since the fall of 2000, and wireless capabilities were offered in early 2001. Wireless PDAs get the data off the Web site by using AvantGo, a service that converts Web data into simple forms that can be easily displayed on the small screens of PDAs.

Although Hung's team has a solid handle now on the original problem, the WebFOCUS solution has opened the city's eyes to the potential of a system that can deliver detailed information on all public facilities, using open networks and Web standards.

Dave Semple, Richmond's director of parks, talks about the complexities of managing remote sprinkler systems or tennis court lighting in public parks in a city famous for its rainfalls. Automatic lighting and sprinkler systems may go on even in the middle of a downpour – and the downpour can be over by the time a parks staffer gets to the scene to turn them off.

The city, which has won national and international awards for its beautiful boulevards, parks, and neighborhoods, wants to combine an intelligent database with an inventory of trees on city property. The city plans to implement this database with Information Builders' WebFOCUS.

Built for the Future

The WebFOCUS system lends itself to future development because of its adherence to open standards and use of widely available hardware. Because the data is available on the Web, and the only client software required is a Web browser, city departments can access data in a number of ways. They can choose desktop or PDA, wired or wireless.

"That's a line that goes over really well with our staff: You can pick whatever device you want to use. Users love to have a choice," says Hung.