In the Sponge City project, we have set Visdom up as a distributed decision support system for the merchant district of Shenzhen, China. The system is now in operational use and is currently being evaluated by our client Tencent, the largest internet services provider in Asia. Tencent is now able to investigate a large number of different flood and heavy rain scenarios in the city of their new headquarters. They have been provided with a feature-rich configuration of our software to enable the simulation and analysis of a closed water loop within the city. This includes the modelling of uncertain rainfall events coupled with underground pipe networks, soil infiltration, protection failures, various protection measures, river floods, and tsunamis.

The access to the computational power of Visdom is provided to Tencent via a thin client app. The actual simulations are executed on-the-fly on a remote server running at VR-KB, our local partner in the project. VR-KB is responsible for data collection and data preparation. As one important outcome of the project, we consider the establishment of workflows between the Visdom team and our Chinese colleagues to facilitate future projects in the China region.