A collaboration between SolData and the IT Innovation Centre.
The centre
The IT Innovation Centre is the applied R&D centre of the School of Electronics and Computer Science. The Centre researches, develops, architects, engineers and integrates innovative IT systems, delivering proofs-of-concept, demonstrators and novel operational systems. IT Innovation's professional services include research and development, consultancy, technology due diligence and support for early adoption. The Centre is based at the University of Southampton Science Park in Chilworth.
The project
Building new metro systems and urban road and rail links often involves tunnelling under heavily built up areas, where it is vital that any resulting ground displacement is detected as early as possible. The IT Innovation Centre has worked with high-performance measurement company SolData to improve the interpretation and decision management supported by ground displacement sensor networks.
The collaboration
IT Innovation and SolData are partners in SANY, a three year collaborative R&D project on sensor networks, supported by the European Commission. After the first year of the SANY project IT Innovation analysed sensor measurement datasets recorded from SolData tunnelling activity and quickly identified three key areas where sensor fusion technology would be of immediate benefit:
- Geo-spatial interpolation of sensor measurements to 'fill in the gaps' of in-situ point measurements, allowing areas with poor sensor coverage to be identified and unusual measurements quickly spotted
- Fusion of social and economic information with ground movement measurements to identify buildings that might have cracks forming in them and allow decision makers to assess the socio-economic impact of this possible cracking
- Providing automated access to the ground displacement measurements, allowing engineers to predict ground displacement up to 36 hours in advance of tunnelling progress. This is useful during live tunnelling applications to halt progress and assess developing risks of subsidence.
Benefits to SolData
The ground displacement model and geospatial interpolation processes are relevant to the SolData core business, and the company is aiming to move this work closer to market. SolData are also interested in making use of the fusion processing framework itself to simplify adding in new processing capability and lowering the cost to integrate with third party sensor measurement database services.
Benefits to the IT Innovation Centre
In SANY the IT Innovation Centre has further established itself as a leading player in sensor fusion research for geospatial sensor networks, following on from success in the IMARQ project.
Measurable outcomes
The IT Innovation Centre has developed a generic sensor fusion software framework that works with OGC compliant sensor measurement databases descriptions. IT Innovation has also provided input to the next generation OGC SWE standards via discussions at the OGC SWE working group meetings. The SANY project as a whole has published a 'cookbook' to disseminate the project’s results to industry.
Future research
- Support for efficiently managing very large datasets (terabytes) generated by large collaborative research and industrial communities found in climate change research, oceanography and oil and gas industrial operations
- Fusion of real-time information feeds (e.g. live video, live drilling operations using sensor measurements etc) to decision-makers.
