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The city of Portland and IBM have finished a yearlong project that both hope will help better guide the Portland Plan, the city’s long-term planning effort.

IBM helped the city develop an interactive model of the relationships that exist among the city’s core systems. These include the economy, housing, education, public safety, transportation, healthcare/wellness, government service and utilities. The resulting computer simulation allows Portland leaders to see how city systems work together and in turn identify opportunities to become a smarter city.

IBM first approached the city in late 2009 about the company’s System Dynamics for Smarter Cities model. The idea was to create a model that allowed city officials to reduce the unintended negative consequences of municipal actions on citizens, as well as uncover hidden beneficial relationships among city policies.

鈥淭he City of Portland has served as a living laboratory during our year-long collaboration to explore how complex city systems behave over time,鈥� said Michael Littlejohn, vice president of strategy for smarter cities at IBM, in a press release on the matter. 鈥淲hile other analytical approaches rely on breaking a problem down into smaller and smaller pieces, the model we’ve created recognizes that the behavior of a system as a whole can be different from what might be anticipated by looking at its parts.鈥�

The work on the model assisted the city in identifying the priority areas for the Portland Plan and setting 25-year objectives, the amount of time the model projects out. These are Economic Prosperity and Affordability, Education, Equity, and Healthy Connected Neighborhoods. The model will also be used to create a metric and track the progress of the plan as it’s implemented.