Rio de Janeiro, a city government in Brazil, and IBM have signed an agreement to build a public information management centre for the city.
The Rio Operations Center will integrate and interconnect information from government departments and public agencies in the municipality for city safety and responsiveness to various types of incidents, such as flash floods and landslides.
IBM research scientists will develop a high-resolution weather forecasting and hydrological modeling system (PMAR) for Rio de Janeiro, which can predict heavy rains up to 48 hours in advance, additionally as part of the agreement.
The mission of the Rio Operations Center is to consolidate data from various urban systems for visualisation, monitoring and analysis. The system is designed for forecasting floods and related emergencies, and is extensible to any event occurring in the city, and will be able to predict rain and possible flash floods, and over time will also be able to evaluate the effects on city traffic.
As part of IBM’s global strategy to develop technology-based offerings to help cities, this centre will integrate all the stages of a crisis management situation from prediction, mitigation and preparedness, to the immediate response to events, and to capture feedback from the system to be used in future incidents.
The system will be based on a unified mathematical model of Rio, involving the gathering of data from the river basin, topographic surveys, the municipality’s historical rainfall logs, and radar feeds for increasing the accuracy of weather forecasts to evaluate and predict effects on the city.
IBM Brazil smarter cities director Pedro Almeida said they are creating an IT platform that will soon be able to gather data on all incidents and events occurring in the city, while the Center will continuously evolve to integrate more city departments and information.
