Sustainable Built Environment

The Smart Nation initiative has brought about both challenges and opportunities to the energy industry, including the integration of intermittent renewable energy sources, integration of distributed energies such as electric vehicles and batteries, green building technologies, and demand-side management and enabling a more flexible energy market. We focus on developing intelligent energy management systems in smart grids to optimise energy system efficiency and to achieve energy resilience.
Our platforms are powered by advanced energy data analytics and complex system modelling and optimisation technologies. We provide solutions to industry partners for the monitoring and predictive maintenance of energy management systems, providing operational strategies to improve system efficiency whilst achieving significant cost savings. Moving forward, our energy systems will support new applications such as electric vehicle charging, micro-grids, resilient power systems, and renewable energy integration.

Engineering structures, such as buildings, bridges, tunnels, pipelines, aerospace and maritime structures are subject to deterioration and ageing, which reduces their quality of service associated with reliability and increasing risks in safety. We conduct research to develop technologies and solutions to enable monitoring of structure loading, operational evaluation, damage-provoking conditions, and prediction of structure failures so that proper reaction and corrective actions can take place in a timely manner to avoid catastrophic accident or economic loss. The integrity of assets such as underground pipelines can be monitored by the online measurements of temperature, acoustic, vibration, and strain etc. Using innovative technologies, such as fiber optic sensing, we are developing online monitoring solutions to provide real-time and high-speed in-operation monitoring. The solutions will enable us to detect anomalies at an early stage and allowing more time for owners or operators to plan and implement a remediation plan. Moving forward, we will develop automated inspection solutions for buildings and assets by integrating multidisciplinary technologies, such as drones and robotics, non-destructive testing and visual intelligence etc.

We perform R&D on Intelligent Sensor Platform for Smart Facilities focusing on implementing real-time intelligence at the edge. Edge Analytics will minimise the transmission of raw sensor data to the server, hence reducing communication bandwidth and latency. The key focuses here include developing deployable algorithms on Sensor Drift Detection and System Anomaly Detection at the edge, reducing false positives and false negatives. The Edge Intelligence will be developed on commercial off-the-shelf processors, such as FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) or AI (Artificial Intelligence) ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit). The Intelligent Sensor Platform developed is a scalable end to end solution which provides sensor data fusion with standard and reliable communication, backend intelligence, a database for further data processing, and storage in both private and public cloud.