Rezatec enabling cities to become more resilient to environmental and social changes

The Rezatec resilience service delivers data analytics via a web-based portal to infrastructure and urban asset managers providing mission critical insights to support highly-targeted improvements and mitigating actions against subsidence, flooding, climate change and human-related urban landscape changes.

There is an escalating global need for cities to become more resilient to fast-changing human and natural environmental pressures. In tandem, there is also a growing availability of satellite-derived earth observation data that allows the hyper-detailed mapping, monitoring and analysis of the natural landscapes and the built environment.

This initiative addresses the growing requirement for predictive decision-support tools for urban infrastructure managers. Through the evolution of Rezatec’s geospatial data analytics services and the incorporation of new satellite data sources, e.g. ESA’s Sentinel 1 and 2, these tools are set to become the future of strategic urban planning.

The planned service will make use of Rezatec’s machine learning technology and techniques applied to satellite data (using a mixture of sensor types including Optical, Synthetic Aperture Radar, Thermal Infra-Red and LIDAR), Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) devices and Satellite Communications to collect and send ground data from locations where mobile network coverage cannot be relied upon.

This pioneering initiative is supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) as part of the ARTES Integrated Applications Promotion (IAP) programme, which is dedicated to funding and promoting the development of space-based applications, services and solutions for the needs of European citizens and society at large.

Philip Briscoe, Business Unit Director, Rezatec, states “We expect the URGED project to have a profound effect on city-regional economic, environmental and human wellbeing by demonstrating the value of space data in enabling strategic investment and decision making to support more resilient development pathways.”

Roberto Cossu, Application Engineer, European Space Agency said “Rezatec’s urban resilience project is important not just in terms of commercial opportunity but its value to future cities to enable them to meet environmental and social challenges.”

Rezatec’s innovative predictive decision-support tools can identify where there is the likely high risk of subsidence and flooding by applying predictive analysis and techniques. These powerful data insights are then provided via subscription-based access to dynamically-updated data analytics as a service, which represents a new commercial model with greater scalability and price advantages than current consulting based approaches.

As an example, the project data products can be used by infrastructure management companies, water companies and town/city authorities to:

• Assess land surface movement and soil subsidence hazard;
• Identify pipeline segments susceptible to land surface movement;
• Forecast infrastructure and pipeline damage associated with land surface change;
• Identify and assess exposure to drainage hazard, and;
• Provide a relative estimation of urban flood vulnerability.

The initiative kicked-off in May 2016 and Rezatec is has started planning the pilot implementations with named end-users: Welsh Water, Wessex Water, AMEC Foster Wheeler and The Ecological Sequestration Trust (TEST).