Big-Data Analytics Leveraged to Enhance Environmental Engineering

Researchers and engineers from the newly established Centre of Computational Intelligence for Environmental Engineering (CIEE) at the Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand hope to enhance environmental monitoring & engineering by building a 3D city model of Auckland.

What Is This 3D City Model Capable Of?

The 3D model will allow the engineers and researchers to map out the changing environment of Auckland’s city-scape in its entirety, in real-time. It will map-out not only the city’s topography, but also its infrastructure including water & sewage piping and power lines.

But wait, there’s more…

When all this information is united with the live environmental data provided by New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) the 3D model comes to life, generating invaluable insights into the city of Auckland.

How Will Auckland Benefit From The CIEE Research?

Overtime the researchers and engineers will be able to combine the environmental data taken from numerous sources into a single, unified information system. Cloud could then be used to distribute services and information from the system.

What this means is, for example, environmental protection agencies and regulatory groups would be capable of monitoring air & water quality in real-time. This would increase response time to high pollutant levels dramatically.

What Is The End Goal?

Ideally, if everything goes to plan, the researchers hope to ultimately access the multi-billion dollar export industry, selling the tech to other countries and globally operating companies.

Professor Hossein Sarrafzadeh points to China as presenting Australia’s best export opportunity. The environmental engineering industry in China is worth billions of dollars and the Chinese are already investing heavily in the same area - air & water quality and management technologies.

The CIEE has partnered with Chinese tech company, LJDY to benefit from their expertise when it comes to technical support, additional funding and their ties to the Chinese market which will eventually prove beneficial in exporting and selling the technology.

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