Urban Environmental Management
Regional Development Planning
    CityWare: urban environmental management CityWare Image Gallery



      CityWare is a modular, web-based, interactive, model-based information and decision support system for the urban environment. The main idea is to support better management of the urban environment: regulatory compliance, public and environmental health, safety, resource efficiency, and sustainability are the main goals.

      The system is designed for cities, metropolitan areas and urban conglomerates. CityWare integrates applicable components of several compatiable systems and shared elements, includeing AirWare, WaterWare, and Riskware, Coastware". The flexibility of the modular architecture, SaaS and optional cloud computing makes it easy to adapt and apply the system to a broad range of physiographic and meteorological, socio-economic, and environmental conditions, regulatory and institutional structures. While the primary audience is the city administration, CityWare is also designed for public information, and can offer customized information services on an individual subscription basis, e.g., for sensitive target groups or health professionals, providing active and passive information also for mobile clients (SmartPhone, tablet). CityWare applications can be embedded in the real-time expert system RTXPS that coordinates and drives the complex application scheduling (from long-term strategic planning to real-time control) with its conditional dependencies, and manages monitoring data streams, the user interface, and compliance monitoring, different reporting channels, alerts and alarms.

      Major topics and application domains covered by CityWare include:

      • Weather forecasts and urban climate, extreme events and "urban stress", but also input to most other models;
      • Air quality, which covers nowcasts in support of monitoring, forecasts, scenario analysis, emission control, and also noise (transportation, construction);
      • Transportation, which includes the very high resolution dynamic 3D simulation of aircraft (LTO), shipping, rail and road transport using an arbitrary resolution cellur automata and convolution modeling technique for emissions and noise;
      • DUST modeling, that computes dust (PM10, PM2.5) emissions from natural sources, i.e., wind entrainment from soils and long-range transport of these particulates;
      • Water resources (urban water supply) and quality including sewers, treatment and effluents to surface and coastal waters;
      • Integrated Coastal Zone Management looks at regional development issues for and around coastal cities with its own dedicated set of ICZM methods and tools;
      • Technological risk management, risk assessment and emergency management for industrial and transportation accidents;
      • Urban flooding, drainage, groundwater recharge;
      • Forest fires, around cities in arid regions;
      • Land use dynamics, long-term analysis of urban and regional development scenarios, land use planning and zoning;
      • Environmental policy, ISO 14000 support, EIA/SEA/SIA, ....

      CityWare and is built with the contribution of projects and urban case studies world wide, including cities such as:

      CityWare integrates the results from a range of international RTD projects, including EUREKA, European Framework Programmes, or INTAS. Primarily thematic, these project all used cities and urban conglomerates as their case studies and test cases.

      CityWare is designed to provide easy access to advanced tools of data analysis and the design and evaluation of environmental policies as well as for continuous, real-time monitoring and control for operation management tasks. The intended audience ranges from city administrations to the general public. The components include:



      • RTXPS:  a real-time hybrid (forward and backward chaining) expert system for continuous assessment and operational control, coordinating all component elements from monitoring to forecasting, reporting, communication, and decision support; this also supports continuous QA/QC, ssuing of warning and alters, task management, and scheduled reporting;
      • Time-series analysis for environmental monitoring, continuous real-time data acquisition from multiple sensors including video and remote sensing imagery;
      • A suite of simulation and optimization models including regular and event driven forecasts of key environmental parameters and indicators augmenting the monitoring data and feeding into the automatic control and decision support tools illustrated by a range of operational prototypes (air).
      • Embedded GIS and integrated data base management using a modular, distributed, object-oriented design;
      • An embedded geographical information system,that manages urban spatial data (e.g., transportation network or emission inventories)
      • Expert systems functionality for user support (intelligent interface), impact assessment and any estimation and classification tasks, and
      • Intranet/Internet support for easy access including mobile clients, public information in hyper-media formats and presentations.
      • Support tools also include a web-based eLearning platform for intelligent, interactive manuals, tutorials, and a (post-graduate) Urban Ecology seminar (at the University of Innsbruck).
      These components are integrated with an interactive and graphical user interface designed for fast and intuitive understanding, supporting also infrequent and non-technical users with little or no computer experience, but also mission critical emergency situations with high stress levels.


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