Connected cities could be more disaster-resilient cities

How can smart technology help communities ensure resilience in the face of natural disasters? Siemens explores the possibilities in a feature in its latest “Pictures of the Future” online magazine.

The year is 2030. The place, Houston, watching the approach of a massive hurricane named Rose. The city’s mayor is receiving a briefing in advance of the storm … not from a physical member of her team, but from an intelligent interface in the city’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) software.

The interface briefs the mayor on how technology is enabling the city to be as prepared as possible for Rose’s onslaught:

• With the storm’s trajectory confirmed, software agents in the OEM system began gathering information from every part of the city’s infrastructure to make sure facilities from wastewater treatment plants to hospitals had adequate backup power supplies and other emergency resources in place.
• One OEM agent drills through the region’s traffic system to ensure that batteries in all the traffic signals are fully charged so they can keep operating during and after the storm. It also programs the traffic system so emergency vehicles are guaranteed of green lights when responding to incidents. The system will be smart enough to actually turn off the engine of any “crazy guy” who tries to run a red light when an ambulance or fire engine is heading through an intersection.
• Having identified pipelines and valves with the capacity to handle much of the expected heavy rainfall, the OEM system begins negotiating an acre-foot price with officials in charge of a nearby aquifer that could use the water for replenishing — a move that could also reduce potential city flooding by 76 percent.
• As residential evacuations peak and city energy demands drop, the OEM system prepares to ramp down operations at several of the city’s older power plants. It also communicates with the National Weather Service to optimize configuration of area offshore wind turbines to protect them from damage as much as possible while also ensuring as much energy generation as possible. Excess wind energy produced during the storm is scheduled to be send to storm-hardened energy storage centers and converted into hydrogen fuel that can be used after Rose passes.

While many of these applications remain mostly hypothetical today, there’s little reason they couldn’t actually work in the real world based on smart technology that’s available. What’s needed to get us from here to there is a commitment to investing in infrastructure so that, one day, all our city systems — from 9-1-1 dispatch to electric utilities — are interconnected in “smart” enough ways to handle the demands of any disaster.