Business challenge
Nairobi is one of the world’s fastest-growing
cities. How could it find a way to manage
a fleet of vehicles, assess traffic and
maintain roads without implementing costly
monitoring technology?
Transformation
Without a clear view of road quality and how
drivers respond to it, Nairobi City County found
it difficult to manage its fleet of garbage trucks.
By analyzing data from smartphones mounted
in the trucks, IBM is creating a digital map of
road conditions, driver behavior and traffic
flows, helping to build a safer, more efficient
and cleaner city.
Business benefits:
Manages
a fleet of vehicles and reveals
inefficiencies in waste
management processes
Eases
traffic congestion, keeping
Nairobi’s citizens and
businesses on the move
Improves
road safety by detecting
hazards and improving road
maintenance planning
Living Roads
IoT paves the way
to cost-effective fleet
management, safer
roads, and reduced
traffic congestion
IBM Research – Africa is IBM’s 12th research lab and the first industrial
research center in Africa. With facilities in Kenya and South Africa, it
is developing commercially-viable solutions to transform lives and
spark new business opportunities in areas such as transportation,
water and energy.
Dr. Aisha Walcott Bryant
Researcher
“For the first time city
officials have a clear
understanding of
where potholes and
speedbumps are.”
Dr. Aisha Walcott Bryant, Researcher
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Serving a bustling
city
vital civic services such as garbage
collection – and in turn, raise public health
issues and impact business.
Nairobi is one of the world’s fastestgrowing cities, which places
increasing pressure on its systems
and infrastructure. Experts estimate
that Nairobi loses up to USD1 million
every day due to congestion’s impact
on lost productivity, fuel consumption,
traffic accidents, air quality, and many
other issues.
Nairobi City County recently invested
over USD3 million in new waste collection
vehicles – but due to the difficult
road conditions and traffic, the new
trucks were struggling to deliver the
improvements in waste management
efficiency that the city had expected.
Realizing that IBM Research was already
working on the city’s traffic problems, the
head of the Department for Environment,
Water, Energy, Forestry and Natural
resources met with the IBM team and
asked them to help find a solution.
Dr. Aisha Walcott Bryant, Researcher
at IBM, says: “Conventional traffic
management relies on citywide sensor
networks, which are not feasible in
cities where the road maintenance
budget is tight.
“Such solutions also fail to take account
of common factors that influence traffic
in many developing cities. For example,
heavy goods are often transported on
low-grade roads, creating potholes that
can turn major streets into single-lane
passages. Bad weather can make whole
sections of road impassable for days
at a time, completely changing the way
traffic flows.
“And in many places, speed-bumps
have been installed – in some cases by
unauthorized parties, in haste, and not up
to standard. Potholes and poor-quality,
unmarked speedbumps can cause
damage to vehicles as well as impacting
traffic flows, and there is no central
registry of where they are located.”
Road conditions have a wide range of
impacts on the lives of Nairobi’s citizens,
the efficiency of its businesses and the
ability of its government to drive change.
Where road conditions are poor or
unknown, it is hard to manage traffic
effectively. This leads to congestion and
dangerous driver behavior, which delay
2
Dr. Walcott Bryant comments: “When
the city asked IBM to help improve the
efficiency of its garbage trucks, we
realized that the trucks themselves
could help us solve the traffic problems
by collecting reliable data about road
conditions across the city.”
Harnessing the
Internet of Things
Smarter use of
resources
IBM Research – Africa’s mobility team
realized that a locally relevant solution
was the key: Nairobi needed a method
of capturing data about road and traffic
conditions that would not require the
investment and maintenance costs of a
traditional solution.
Dr. Walcott Bryant explains: “We
identified a bottleneck in the waste
disposal process: garbage trucks were
spending between two and four hours
per day at the dump. Most trucks were
only able to visit the dump once per day,
due to its location, traffic congestion,
and sometimes because the trucks were
going off-route to undertake other jobs.
The team came up with an elegant,
low-cost answer: they installed adapted
smartphones in a number of the city’s
waste collection trucks. As the trucks
drive around the city, the phones’ sensors
(such as accelerometers, magnetometers,
gyroscopes and GPS) stream data
about each vehicle’s location, speed,
acceleration and vibration levels to an IBM
analytics solution in the cloud.
Technically speaking, the data is
collected by a custom-developed app
known as IBM® StreetSense, which
runs on the smartphones. IBM Internet
of Things Foundation provides the
interface between the smartphones
and IBM InfoSphere® Streams, which
enables real-time analytics of where the
vehicles are and why they are stopping—
among many other key performance
indicators (KPIs).
The data is stored in an IBM Cloudant®
database, which provides an ideal
architecture for managing the kind
of high-velocity spatial and temporal
information generated by the IBM
StreetSense app. Finally, IBM Bluemix™ is
used to deliver the results of the analysis
to users in the county administration,
which they can access on mobile devices
or PCs.
“We are creating a digital map of the city,
showing hazards that cause drivers to
brake or swerve such as speed bumps
and potholes,” explains Dr. Walcott
Bryant. “We can also see how long the
trucks are spending collecting refuse, in
traffic, at the dump and off-route.
“This has transformed our understanding
of how road conditions, congestion, waste
management and a host of other factors
interact to create Nairobi’s complex traffic
situation. More importantly, it has already
given us a lot of insights into how that
situation can be improved.”
3
“Drivers also typically spent up to two
hours per day in traffic, wasting time
and fuel. One of our goals is to optimize
routes according to traffic levels and instill
transparency into the fleet management
process. This will help the city complete
more collections using its existing fleet –
and therefore keep Nairobi cleaner and
safer for its citizens.”
The hazard map also enables authorities
to improve road maintenance planning.
For example, in one sub-county alone, the
map has highlighted 750 potholes, which
had been causing damage and delays to
garbage trucks and other traffic.
“We’re in discussions with city authorities
and private companies about how the
solution could be used to optimize routes
for emergency services and delivery
vehicles,” says Dr. Walcott Bryant. “It’s
opening up so many opportunities – not
just for Nairobi, but for other emerging
cities around the world.”
The solution offers huge potential for
Nairobi to become an exemplar African
smarter city by using a cost-effective and
smart approach for gathering actionable
insight about traffic flows, while also
enabling smarter decisions about street
planning and road safety.
By building fleet services that capture
real-time traffic dynamics, road surface
conditions and driver behavior at low
cost, IBM and Nairobi are demonstrating
to the world how locally relevant,
contextualized innovations can increase
government efficiency, provide costsavings across sectors, and create new
potential revenue streams.
Solution components
•IBM® StreetSense
•IBM Bluemix™
•IBM Cloudant®
•IBM Internet of Things Foundation
•IBM InfoSphere® Streams
•IBM Research – Africa
Take the next step
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