WebFOCUS Keeps City Above Water, On Track for Future

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By Paul Degroot

	SNAPSHOT Organization: The City of Richmond, pop. 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. Annual budget: CA$242 million. The Challenge: City planners needed to analyze historical and trend data from water and sanitary pumps that keep the city dry and clean. The data was locked into a proprietary database, and city staff were unable to deliver the information that planners needed to guide development and emergency response efforts. Strategy: WebFOCUS was used to create a Web site from which city officials could retrieve reports about alerts, trends, pump status and other information. At Information Builder's suggestion, the site was wireless enabled, giving public works staff access to the data while they are in the field. The Results: The city finally has the intelligence it needs to be able to plan effectively for the future. As a bonus, the system uses inexpensive, open standards and can be easily extended to future technologies, made widely available to city staff, and can be accessed from a wide variety of inexpensive devices. Information Builders Solution: WebFOCUS, plus Web services from Information Builders strategic partner AvantGo.

Edward Hung's city is under water at times during the year. Or at least it would be, if the drainage pumps operated by the City of Richmond, on Canada's west coast, weren't constantly pumping water into the broad Fraser River, which surrounds the city on three sides. On the fourth side, the salt waters of Georgia Strait lap the city 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 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

To gain intelligence about that 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, the ability to put WebFOCUS reports on the Web means the city can put that intelligence in the hands of anyone in the city, 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 wireless PDAs.

That's a far cry from Richmond's earliest alert systems. In those days sirens would sound and a red light would flash until someone-usually a nearby resident-would call and report the alarm. The SCADA system and wireless network 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 created with 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 have access to trend information, such as how hard each pump is working, how often it has failed in the past, and how its load or activity changes after a frequent West Coast downpour drenches the city, or after a new parking lot is paved in its area.

Asked how Richmond assembled this information in the past, Hung 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 last night would take a day," says Hung, manager of the city's Advanced Research and Technologies team.

The Wireless Connection

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, in the spring of 2000. 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 city parks in a city like Richmond, famous for its West Coast 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

"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.