Continued Implementaton of IBM Smarter City PartnershipMasterpiece on the Mississippi
TO: The Honorable Mayor and City Council Members
FROM: Michael C. Van Milligen, City Manager
SUBJECT: City in Motion - An IBM First Of A Kind Proposal
DATE: October 1, 2010
Dubuque
bfrd
All- America City
2007
Assistant City Manager Cindy Steinhauser and Smarter Sustainable Dubuque Project
Manager David Lyons are recommending continued implementation of the Smarter City
Partnership with IBM into the area of vehicle miles traveled.
The City of Dubuque has been working with IBM Research for over a year now on
Smarter Sustainable Dubuque. Efforts successfully underway already include the
Smarter Water and Smarter Electricity pilots. Conversation is underway to potentially
incorporate natural gas in the near future and efforts will be made to include wellness.
The overall concept is to provide citizens with real time information to be able to assist
them in saving money and time, while conserving resources and reducing green house
gas emissions, through more effective utilization of resources. Incorporating as many
"silos" of energy utilization as possible into the model will give citizens the maximum
opportunity to discover long term savings through resource utilization changes.
Reducing VMT (vehicle miles traveled) and improving transit performance is an area
originally planned to be incorporated into Smarter Sustainable Dubuque if and when a
source of funding could be identified.
IBM has an internal funding program known as "First Of A Kind" (FOAK) funding. It is
reserved for investing in potential innovations that IBM believes are critical, but which
need to be applied and validated with clients in the real world. A "City in Motion" FOAK
has been approved within IBM and Dubuque is being invited to participate. Attached is
a short summary of the proposal, which would have IBM investing between $1.5 and
$2.0 million in the project and designing, implementing and completing the research
with Dubuque in 2011. The City of Dubuque would be asked to contribute $100,000 to
support project management, software and hardware costs, with this $100,000 coming
from the previously received and committed Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block
Grant funding. There may be a small amount of additional funding which would come
from additional community partners, but the City commitment would be limited to this
previously authorized $100,000.
If City Council authorizes the proceeding, the City would put together a team to
negotiate a final contract with IBM which would be brought back to City Council for final
approval.
Even modest improvements to increased ridership of the transit system and modest
decreases in vehicle miles traveled in the community will result in millions of dollars of
savings to the community and thousands of tons of avoided carbon emissions.
This project would apply technology innovation to understand movement of people and
vehicles in the city to build better mobility models that can be used to optimize transit
planning and operations, City planning, zoning and emergency response planning while
reducing resource utilization and green house gas emissions.
The City's source of funding is the federal allocation of Energy Efficiency and
Conservation Block Grant funding received, to be used according to the City's approved
plan for projects like this.
I concur with the recommendation and respectfully request Mayor and City Council
approval.
Michael C. Van Milligen
MCVM:jh
Attachment
cc: Barry Lindahl, City Attorney
Cindy Steinhauser, Assistant City Manager
David Lyons, Smarter Sustainable Dubuque Project Manager
Masterpiece on the Mississippi
TO: Michael C. Van Milligen, City Manager
FROM: David Lyons, Smarter Sustainable Dubuque Project Manager
Cindy Steinhauser, Assistant City Manager
SUBJECT: City in Motion — An IBM First OfA Kind Proposal
DATE: October 1, 2010
Introduction
The purpose of this memorandum is to inform City Council of an opportunity to partner
with IBM Research on the development of an IBM First OfA Kind project related to
applying technology innovation to understand movement of people and vehicles in the
city to build better mobility models that can be used to optimize transit planning and
operations, city planning, zoning and emergency response planning while reducing
resource utilization and green house gas emissions.
Background
The City of Dubuque has been working with IBM Research for over a year now on
Smarter Sustainable Dubuque. Efforts successfully underway already include the
Smarter Water and Smarter Electricity pilots. Conversation is underway to potentially
incorporate natural gas in the near future. The overall concept is to provide citizens with
real time information to be able to assist them in saving money and time, while
conserving resources and reducing green house gas emissions, through more effective
utilization of resources. Incorporating as many "silos" of energy utilization as possible
into the model will give citizens the maximum opportunity to discover long term savings
through resource utilization changes. Reducing VMT (vehicle miles traveled) and
improving transit performance is an area originally planned to be incorporated into
Smarter Sustainable Dubuque if and when a source of funding could be identified.
Discussion
Dubuque
Ititetti
All-America City
' LI
2007
IBM has an internal funding program known as "First Of A Kind" (FOAK) funding. It is
reserved for investing in potential innovations that IBM believes are critical, but which
need to applied and validated with clients in the real world. A "City in Motion" FOAK has
been approved within IBM and Dubuque is being invited to participate. Attached is a
short summary of the proposal, which would have IBM investing between $1.5 and $2.0
million in the project and designing, implementing and completing the research with
Dubuque in 2011. The City of Dubuque would be asked to contribute $100,000 to
support project management, software and hardware costs, with this $100,000 coming
from the previously received and committed EECBG funding. There may be a small
amount of additional funding which would come from additional community partners, but
the City commitment would be limited to this previously authorized $100,000.
If City Council authorizes proceeding, the City would put together a team to negotiate a
final contract with IBM which would be brought back to City Council for final approval.
Even modest improvements to increased ridership of the transit system and modest
decreases in vehicle miles traveled in the community will result in millions of dollars of
savings to the community and thousands of tons of avoided carbon emissions.
Request
We respectfully request City Council support for negotiating a final City in Motion FOAK
project with IBM to be brought back for Council final consideration at a later date.
Cc: Teri Goodmann, Assistant City Manager
Chris Kohlmann, Information Services Manager
Jenny Larson, Budget Director
Cori Burbach, Sustainability Coordinator
Eric Dregne, Dubuque 2.0
City in Motion
IBM Research First of a Kind
Proposal Summary
Principal Investigator: Milind Naphade
Naphade @us.ibm.com
The City in Motion Research project is a first of a kind (FOAK) proposal being
undertaken by IBM Research. The proposal applies technology innovation to understand
the movement of people and vehicles in a city to build better mobility models that can be
used to optimize transit planning and operations, city planning, zoning and emergency
response planning. The requirement of a FOAK project is that this innovation needs to be
applied to and validated with clients in the field.
IBM Research would like to apply this innovation to help the City of Dubuque improve
its transit operations. IBM Research will work closely with the city and the transit
operator to understand and model mobility patterns in the city and overlay the bus routes
on these models. This will help the city analyze and assess effectiveness of its transit and
provide the city the opportunity to make changes to its transit to better respond to needs.
IBM Research will work with Dubuque 2.0 to recruit up to 1000 volunteers who have
smart- phones for understanding mobility. IBM Research will then provide the volunteers
with a client application that will allow anonymized measurement of people movement
mapped to a fine grid. This anonymization will ensure that the identity and the phone
information of the volunteers will always remain anonymous and confidential, yet it will
allow IBM to understand and build patterns of aggregate movement of the volunteers.
Since the volunteers form a sample of the total population of Dubuque this data will then
be extrapolated to estimate people movement models for the city. The bus movement data
will then be overlaid on top of these spatio - temporal models to estimate the efficiency of
bus operations and to predict the true demand for transit. IBM Research will work with
Dubuque 2.0 and the city to conduct surveys among the volunteer population to calibrate
the demand models, design incentives for increasing ridership and offer suggestions to
the transit operations that may result in an increase in ridership. If the city is able to
implement the suggested changes, IBM Research will then analyze the change in
ridership.
The duration of this project is expected to be 12 months. The suggested tasks and
milestones over the project duration are listed below.
IBM will expect the City of Dubuque to help in facilitating the volunteer recruitment,
data gathering and subject matter expertise in interpreting people movement models.
Mechanism for collecting real -time transit information about
buses (IBM)
Recruitment of 1000 volunteers with smart phones for mobility
experiment (City, Dubuque 2.0)
Jan 12011
March 12011 Mechanism for collecting real -time mobility /movement of
current users and non -users of public transit (IBM)
April 1 2011 Survey to be conducted to calibrate models (City/Dubuque2.0)
May 12011 Calibrated Demand Models for current users & non -users
(IBM)
Evaluation mechanisms for assessing accessibility of transit
Aug 12011 Reports of evaluation of client transit system
Recommendations for potential improvements (IBM)
Oct 12011 Survey to be conducted to evaluate changes (City/Dubuque 2.0)
Nov 12011
Evaluation of change in ridership based on suggested changes
and final report (IBM)
A summary of how FOAK projects work
The estimated IBM investment in FOAK projects is typically between $1.5 Million and
$2 Million. This includes support for the research conducted as well as the participation
of experts from various IBM business divisions.
For a FOAK project to occur a client is needed to test the innovation in the field and the
client commitment is needed in the following ways
1. Investing between $100,000 and $150,000 to pay for the project management, and /or
hardware, software expenses. The hardware and software requirements need to be
figured out but will most likely be IBM H/W and S /W.
2. Commit time of key resources to provide data, information and subject matter
expertise to the project
3. Agree to become a reference client for IBM to showcase the technology