IBM has unveiled CityOne, a Smarter Planet interactive simulation game that is designed to help business and civic leaders make their cities and industries smarter by solving real-world business, environmental, and logistical problems.
The simulation game enables players -- business leaders, city planners, government workers -- to develop and budget improvements that address some of the biggest challenges in global cities. It provides more than 100 real-world scenarios to transform cities through technologies that reduce traffic congestion, save water, streamline supply chains and tap alternative energy sources, says IBM.
You can view a trailer of the Smarter Planet Game at Youtube.
In all of the missions, players must determine the best way to balance the city's financial, environmental and sociological interests, says IBM. They are challenged with improving the city by attaining revenue and profit goals, increasing customer satisfaction, and making the environment greener with a limited budget.
Players also will learn how to adopt technologies such as business process management, service reuse, cloud computing and collaborative technologies to help make organizations in city systems more intelligent.
Cities consume an estimated 75 percent of the world's energy, emit more than 80 percent of the greenhouse gases, and lose as much as 20 percent of their water supply due to infrastructure leaks, according to IBM. CityOne is a virtual environment that helps business and government leaders learn how to use advanced technology and to better understand how their city infrastructure works in order to improve their energy and water efficiency and cut greenhouse gas emissions.
In addition, CityOne content is linked with cloud-delivered business process management capabilities that allow real-time communication with other players and IBM industry experts. This allows players to discuss how the process models from the game relate to real world implementations.
Since plans for the game were announced in May, more than 8,000 people have pre-registered to play CityOne, IBM says. The U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also provided content and resources to help develop the CityOne simulation game.
IBM's Smarter Planet strategy is aimed at helping cities and utilities become smarter with new technologies and tools that help them better manage their resources, while reducing cost, increasing reliability and lowering energy and water consumption.
