Abstract
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Business Intelligence (BI) has traditionally been used in organizations as a strategic tool to
maximize profit. When coupled with Geographic Information Systems, however, BI can be transformed into
a cutting edge decision support system for planning local and regional areas, as we demonstrate in this paper.
Local and regional governments often face a major challenge in terms of developing a holistic view upon
disjointedly operated utility services in their jurisdictions due to data silos. This limitation has become a
serious impediment to infrastructure planning and regional adaptation to changes. Geo-BI provides tools to
manage data coming from multiple and disparate sources, and visualize them through online interactive userinterfaces.
The SMART Infrastructure Dashboard (SID) is an innovative Geo-BI solution that includes an
open-source ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) toolkit to handle various datasets, a spatially-enabled data
warehouse hosted in PostgreSQL/PostGIS and proprietary BI software for creating and administering
analytical reports and dashboards. SID allows planners and policy makers to analyze the interplay between
the use of infrastructure services, demographics and weather parameters across multiple spatial and temporal
scales. Furthermore, SID enables planners to run various what-if scenarios related to projected consumption
patterns, service vulnerability of utility networks, and transportation demand management. Future research
involves enabling the analysis of networks of networks through SID to understand the propagation of
cascading failures and benefits in interconnected utility networks.