Collaborating municipalities for disaster resiliency and sustainable growth
Tags: Sustainability, Mobility, Tourism, Environment, Smart Cities

Solution

Takamatsu City has built an IoT-based visualization system for its disaster management. The system integrates a wide selection of information and visualizes the real-time emergency situation on the integrated dashboard. Through such a solution, it is now possible to mitigate disaster damages by proactively delivering flood sandbags and notifying the local traffic service providers of the emergency situation. For the sake of residents, the municipality can make a quick and timely decision when ordering or advising evacuation.

Real-time info on water level

Water level of rivers and canals, tide level at quays, and water level at underpasses are monitored through installed water-level sensors. There are also video cameras installed to support a better understanding of critical situations in real-time. Additionally, disaster information coming from the Prefecture (more macroscopic) is integrated.

Rainfall forecast

30-minute period rainfall forecast for geographical meshes of 1km2, updated every 5 minutes, is available via a service called “Rainfall Now-Cast”, offered by the central government (Japan Meteorological Agency).

Traversability of streets/roads

Closure announcement issued by public authorities: a private service based on GPS-based vehicle passage counting is integrated to reveal the real-time traversability for vehicles.

Evacuation shelter’s situation

Starting of shelters is sensed via smart meter signals. The signals are also used to evaluate the probability of blackouts. Using smartphone apps, the city staff also report the shelters’ situation and information of evacuees.

Figure 1 . Takamatsu City’s Disaster Management Solution

In order to build this solution, Takamatsu City installed water level sensors along rivers and quays, at the locations known for high flood probability, as demonstrated in their project executed in 2019. The sensors were also installed at underpasses, as during the typhoon in 2004 a flooded underpass resulted in the death of a civilian. This way, the municipality can manage rivers and canals that are small and tend to flood easily and quickly when concentrated downfalls hit. Video cameras were installed to create an additional insight into the overall situation beside the water level information.

The new sensors-based solution renders the previous regular city staff patrols unnecessary thanks to the available real-time and fine-grained diagnosis level of the local rivers. Furthermore, it is no longer required for the city staff to manually analyse various information with all required information visualized on the geographical map of the integrated dashboard. The system dramatically reduces the time required for information collection and analysis and enables quick and timely actions for handling emergency situations. Also, it is now possible to dispatch the city staff to the pinpointed risk locations, thereby achieving an efficient dispatch of human resources.

Visualized information such as water levels and tide levels are additionally available to citizens via the city’s portal “Open Data Takamatsu”. The idea behind this is to provide citizens with the necessary information should they have to make life-saving decisions: it can be seen as a decision support tool for citizens when they are about to take their own actions for saving their lives.

Figure 2 . Dashboard in the Disaster Management Center

In 2020, two adjacent municipalities, Kan’onji City and Ayagawa Town decided for a shared use of the Common IoT Platform of Takamatsu City by signing the collaboration agreement on March 27, 2020, to form a wide-area disaster resilience initiative. This came as a natural consequence of the common understanding that utilizing IoT data generated from a wider area provides more reliable and better insights. At the same time, such a wide-area collaboration also benefits residents who commute across municipality boundaries every day.

Figure 3 . Mayors signing agreement for the Wide-rea Disaster Management collaboration

While building its Common IoT Platform, Takamatsu City invited regional companies and organizations to form the “Smart City Takamatsu Council”, which is aimed at solving region-specific challenges such as economic vitalization and safety and security through a collaboration of public, business and academic stakeholders. This council consists of working groups created for specific regional challenges. Such problem-focused approach has so far been more successful in generating tangible outcomes for the community than a tech-first approach.