Infrastructure gets smart
We live in an age where infrastructure development is fundamental. Roads, ports, energy generating facilities, water and waste management systems are essential in ensuring increased connectivity between rural and urban areas in the future. They also play a vital role in giving local and regional markets better access to the global economy, increasing the circulation of goods, services and people, and improving economic and social development.
By 2030, there will be 5 billion people living in cities. This will put an added burden on utilities, mobility needs and housing. Meeting this demand will be a challenge for designers, planners and engineers who are already facing issues brought about by ageing infrastructure while being expected to construct new ones for the growing population.
Building smart
How do we get there? We need to build smarter infrastructure which cater to the needs of expanding populations while fixing the problems of maintaining and upgrading existing ones.
We have to come up with reliable energy and water systems, efficient building management and better mobility. The supply of reliable and affordable energy and water is an essential condition for economic growth and livability. The grid system and the water supply network will have to be agile to manage our demands. Efficient control of the built environment improves working and living conditions as well as reducing the carbon footprint of buildings. Better mobility improves accessibility and affordability of public transport systems and leverages technology to utilize alternative modes of transport like cycling and pedestrian paths. The logical direction is to link up the application of technology to traditional brickand- mortar solutions so that we can find methods to improve efficiency and to satisfy user demands. This is the so-called ‘smart’ infrastructure.
The key to this is the development of integrated masterplans — one for land use and the other for digital networks and services. It’s all about data. The type of data we collect and how we collect it is crucial. We are creating intelligent infrastructure that learns and adapts to people’s needs. Cities can use information and communications technology to integrate essential civic data into city dashboards that will enable live citywide monitoring. Sensors and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) technologies will help with managing and recycling waste. It is anticipated that smart wastewater systems can recycle 100 percent of domestic and industrial wastewater.
Smart infrastructure examples
Pipeline systems are responsible for transporting vital resources such as water, oil and gas. Any leakage in the pipe can cause major financial losses and possible environmental damage. In buried pipeline monitoring, sensor nodes are deployed in soil. Traditional methods for pipe monitoring are acoustic measurements, pressure measurements, vision-based systems, ground penetrating radar-based systems, fibre optic monitoring and multimodal systems. The trend now is for underground wireless sensor networks for non-invasive monitoring on existing and new pipes to monitor their structural integrity. Underground wireless sensor networks offer many advantages over the other methods, such as concealment, ease of deployment, retro fitting, reliability and coverage density.
Heavy rainfall, especially in the tropics, often causes flooding if storm water is not removed quickly enough. Drainage is affected by pipe layout, nature of the pipes and availability of retention areas. Smart drains are monitored by sensors, and water flow data is sent to a control centre to open and close drainage channels as needed. A good example of this is Kuala Lumpur’s Smart Tunnel, a storm drainage and road structure which extends 9.7km long, making it the longest storm water tunnel in South East Asia and second longest in Asia. The main objective of building this tunnel was to solve the problem of flash floods in Kuala Lumpur and also to reduce traffic jams during rush hours. There are two components of this tunnel, the storm water tunnel and the motorway tunnel. Under normal weather conditions where there is no flood, no flood water will be diverted into the system. When a flood occurs, the tunnel is activated and flood water is diverted into the bypass tunnel underneath the motorway tunnel. The motorway section would still be open to traffic at this stage. In extreme cases, the motorway would be closed to all traffic. After making sure all vehicles have exited the motorway, automated water-tight gates will be opened to allow flood waters to pass through. After the flood has ended, the tunnel is inspected and cleaned via pressure-washing, and the motorway will be reopened to traffic within 48 hours of closure.
The city of Barcelona uses smart sensors in public waste bins to tell the authorities when the bins are full, letting public waste collectors know when to empty the bins. This has reportedly saved the city 30% in waste handling and transportation costs. In Singapore, pneumatic waste chutes are being constructed in housing developments for occupants to send their waste to collection bins. A pilot scheme was devised in Marina Bay to utilize a smart service tunnel to sort the waste into different categories (metals, plastics, glass and paper) so that the chutes would be diverted at selected times and the different materials could be sorted for recycling or reuse.
Getting electricity to users is necessary for cities to function. The advances in power supplies and grid design now mean that we can have smart grids which enable us to draw and put back electricity as needed. A smart grid consists of a variety of operational and energy measures such as smart meters, smart appliances, renewable energy resources, and energy efficiency resources. Electronic power conditioning and control of the production and distribution of electricity are important aspects of the smart grid. To date, many cities are adopting features of the smart grid, such as smart metering, but none have so far come up with the comprehensive version. Experts estimate that the size of the smart grid market is currently about US$170 billion worldwide.
Building automation systems which control energy in buildings are also considered part of smart infrastructure although they are not part of networks. Advances in so-called ‘smart’ buildings allow occupants to enjoy a comfortable and healthy environment and at the same time achieve cost savings. Smart systems now deploy predictive logic which charts the history of weather and other factors in order to ‘predict’ conditions so that the systems can adjust controls (like heating and cooling) accordingly. On a district scale, cities like Brisbane, Toronto and Helsinki have adopted smart district cooling systems harnessing natural resources to deliver chilled water to a network of buildings, maximizing scales of efficiency in energy and water resources.
The standard future
There are many other examples of smart infrastructure. As cities grow, more innovative ideas will emerge. What does the future hold? Already organizations like ISO are setting standards such as the ISO 37120 for smart infrastructure and smart cities. The British Standards Institute is developing PAS 181 as a smart city framework while the International Electrotechnical Council (IEC) is producing its own framework.
Other features such as resilience and sustainability will form part of the basis for infrastructure design. The Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, based in Washington, is a network of organizations and individuals concerned with the planning, design, construction, and maintenance of infrastructure and it has come up with a sustainability rating system for all civil infrastructure. The Global Infrastructure Basel Foundation has developed a standard for sustainable and resilient infrastructure called SuRe® to make infrastructure projects comparable and attractive to invest in. This global voluntary standard was developed using a multi-stakeholder approach and helps to integrate state-of-the-art sustainability and resilience aspects into infrastructure development and upgrades.
Without infrastructure, cities cannot function. It is vital for us to build better, smarter and more sustainable infrastructure for our future.