Topic outline
COST Action
New COST Action proposal initiated in collaboration with ICI Bucharest, National Institute of Hydrology and Water Management, and other partners.
No of new projects
1 project with research activities direct connected with water resource management:
SPERO – https://spero.ici.ro
The project SPERO – Space technologies used in the management of disasters and major crises, manifested at local, national and regional levels has received funding from the Minister of Research and Innovation, UEFISCDI, project reference: PN-III-P2-2.1-SOL-2016-03-0046, under grant agreement no 3Sol/2017, programme PNCDI III, duration: April 2017 – September 2020. UPB is partner in this project.
Disaster management involves activities aiming to organize and manage resources and responsibilities to minimize human and material losses. The need for solid, real-time information to support authorities’ intervention, coordinate humanitarian activities and remove civilian security threats requires the use and analysis of satellite and multi-source data as well as fast mapping methods. The overall objective of the SPERO project – “Space technologies used in the management of disasters and major crises, manifested at local, national and regional levels” is to create a support platform for the management of emergency situations generated by natural disasters, industrial accidents, humanitarian crisis situations or extreme atmospheric and space phenomena.
The project focuses on building a complex geo-spatial database, visualization, processing and analysis tools; inventory of risk areas and existing and necessary means for the management of major disasters and crises; integrated situational analysis at local, national and regional level; facilitating the access to these informational resources to structures with major crisis prevention and disaster response tasks; substantiating national and regional initiatives and policies and initiatives; Integration and capitalization of national expertise in support areas such as geo-spatial sciences, geodesy, cartography, photogrammetry, remote sensing, astrophysics, optical and video data processing, security and ICT.
The services developed on the SPERO platform are as follow:
S1. Drought Service
S2. Flooding Service
S3. Land sliding service
S4. Earthquake Service (Real Time and Post Crisis)
S5. Service for extreme weather phenomena
S6. In-situ Observation Service (UAS)
S7. Space Weather Service
S8. Space surveillance service
S9. The “Search and Rescue" service
S10. Security Service
The services directed connected with water resource management are S1 - Drought Service, S2 - Flooding Service and S3 - Land sliding service. To support the development of this serviced, special algorithms are developed in Cloud technologies. For example, using Sentinel Satellites (Copernicus program) we can monitor using space technologies the water level, which is defined as the height, in meters above the geoid, of the reflecting surface of continental water bodies. It is observed by space radar altimeters that measure the time it takes for radar pulses to reach the ground targets, directly below the spacecraft (nadir position), and return. Hence, only water bodies located along the satellite's ground tracks can be monitored, with a quality of measurement that not only depends of the size of the water body, but also on the reflecting targets in its surroundings such as topography or vegetation. Water Level is computed as time series: over lakes and over rivers, at the intersections of the river network with the satellite ground tracks, so-called Virtual Stations. The Water Level of lakes is recognized as an Essential Climate Variable (ECV) by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS).
Successful implementation of the project will have a significant impact on the profitability of the economic agents involved by increasing the annual turnover based on the services they offer in the proposed system. The achievement of the proposed system produces immediate positive economic effects by lowering the cost of crisis analysis and management, real-time and accurate estimation of the resources needed to solve crisis situations, as well as subsequent monitoring of the situations and problems generated. The results of the project will be disseminated and exploited through specific activities by the consortium partners (1. National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics (ICI), Bucharest - Project Coordinator, 2. University Politehnica of Bucharest, 3. SC UTI GRUP SA, 4. The Military Equipment and Technologies Research Agency, 5. TERRASIGNA S.R.L., 6. Institute of Space Science Măgurele, 7. Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy, 8. Technical Military Academy of Bucharest).
2 research projects with R&D&I activities related to environment monitoring and management
ForestMon - https://forestmon.hpc.pub.ro
The project ForestMon – Experimental Software System in Cloud Architecture for Woodland Vegetation Coverage Monitoring has received funding from the European Regional Development Fund through the Competitiveness Operational Program 2014-2020, project reference: 1270 / 22.01.2018, under grant agreement MySmis: 105976, Contract 53/05.09.2016, program NETIO: Ecosystem of Research, Innovation and Development of ICT Products and Services for a Company Connected to the Internet of Things, duration: March 2017 – March 2019. UPB is the coordinator in this project. The partner is TERRASIGNA S.R.L.
The overall objective of the project is to improve existing algorithms for processing satellite imagery, to adapt them to work in the Cloud architecture and to implement them in an experimental system. The acquired satellite images are primarily processed and transmitted to the Cloud system, where by appropriate algorithms they divide them into geographic sub-areas. The Cloud system performs parallel and distributed data processing and returns re-assembled images to the original geographic areas. The results of the processing allow the specialists to make immediate interpretations and predictions of the phenomena studied for the monitoring of the cover with woody vegetation.
TEL-MONAER - https://telmonaer.beia-consult.ro
The project TEL-MONAER – Mobile air quality monitoring system has received funding from the European Regional Development Fund through the Competitiveness Operational Program 2014-2020, project reference: 1223 / 22.01.2018, under grant agreement MySmis: 105976, Contract 53/05.09.2016, program NETIO: Ecosystem of Research, Innovation and Development of ICT Products and Services for a Company Connected to the Internet of Things, duration: March 2017 – March 2019. UPB is the coordinator in this project. The partner is BEIA CONSULT INTERNATIONAL.
The TEL-MONAER project aims to develop an IT system using the Internet of Things and Edge / Cloud Computing technologies to monitor and analyze real-time risk factors for the environment and public health. TEL-MONAER will provide a mobile, extensible and scalable system capable of simultaneously monitoring parameters such as SO2, NOx, CO, O3, COV, PM10, PM2.5, C6H6, Pb and other toxic metals, Cd, As and Hg, aromatic polycyclic aromatics (PAH), respectively weather parameters (wind direction and speed, pressure, temperature, solar radiation, relative humidity, precipitation), etc.
No of project proposals
1. Topic: ICT-16-2017 Type of action: RIA (Research and Innovation action)
Proposal number: 780776, Proposal acronym: CONTEDGE
Project title: Content Gathering and Processing Network in Distributed Clouds
CONTEDGE project aims to achieve a cross-Cloud, highly resilient and seamlessly integrated middleware control layer to facilitate the deployment of a distributed content gathering network for industry applications. It will bring in simplified, data- oriented and cost-effective way for data gathering and transformation in federated Cloud infrastructures and offering fault- tolerant middleware services with self-* capabilities for real-time processing and data delivery to dramatically improve the QoS of applications. CONTEDGE will reach far beyond existing Cloud storage and processing platforms by its unique and highly ambitious goal of using an instantly scalable and fault-tolerant platform across multiple Cloud types and providers able to realize real-time gathering and processing of data from heterogeneous sources. Having fast and reliable access to data will generate better support for new applications, mobility access to information and other applications which rely on large volumes of data in real time. The project will develop and build a reliable and available Content Gathering and Processing Network (CGPN) across distributed heterogeneous edge computing environments, and extremely large numbers of high-volume Big Data streams, offered as a framework for end-user applications. The project will bring substantial innovative contributions with respect to: (1) scaling over heterogeneous and unsafe data sources collected in densely interconnected and decentralized distributed (Cloud) infrastructures by improving the existing technologies to optimizing Big Data processing tasks, (2) real-time scheduling and processing of heterogeneous data flows as support for complex event processing. (3) interoperability between diverse, highly distributed and federated environments, and (4) innovative tools for application development to support distributed data processing, predictive analytics and visualization at the service of industrial decision support processes.
2. Topic: ECSEL-2017-2 Type of action: ECSEL-RIA
(ECSEL Research and Innovation Action)
Proposal number: 783148-1, Proposal acronym: IoCPS
Project title: Internet of Cyber-Physical Systems
The project is focusing into the smart mobility, smart energy and smart society application areas related business cases dealing with road traffic, autonomic vehicles, wireless and mobile low-power embedded ecosystems, networked appliances in buildings and immediate environment, cyber-physical systems in the university campus are, dynamic energy communities and energy optimizations in harbor environment. The vertical silo type of solutions dominant in the market today cannot enable smart operation in the referred selected business cases because of fragmentation, interoperability, heterogeneity, dynamicity and energy related challenges. Project aim is to contribute towards horizontal and standard based solutions capable for operating with multiple application areas and capable for operating over the interdisciplinary domain borders. The focused common challenges of selected business cases are related to enabling technical capabilities related to cyber-physical systems, safety and security and smart system integration. These technical capabilities are expected to establish the core of the novel business Internet of Cyber-Physical Systems, which is the innovation target of the project.