An interview with CAE S.p.A. Chairman, Guido Bernardi

We are glad to share CAE’s perspective on recent developments in the real-time monitoring market for civil protection, with a particular focus on innovations in the hydrometric and meteorological fields. It concerns investments aimed at reliability, interoperability and technologies opened to mitigate the risk…

Nowadays the Civil Protection code defines the operation of the National Alert System and recognizes the importance of real-time monitoring for effective hydrogeological risk mitigation. However, the path towards this awareness has been long and arduous, and in some respects, it is not yet fully complete. What role did CAE play in the evolution of hydrometric, rainfall and meteorological monitoring in Italy?

Automatic monitoring networks were crucial in order to improve real-time flood forecasting. Until the late 1970s, monitoring had always been manual and data collection was costly and complicated, making it difficult to realize in the timelines required for early warnings.

From 1980, with a very clear entrepreneurial vision, CAE committed itself to ensure that monitoring system users, usually public administrations with civil protection responsibilities, received reliable, automatic data in real-time, directly in their offices. Our first clients were the “Genio Civile for the Reno River” and CNR-IRPI of Perugia. These were followed by various offices of the national hydrographic service and many others.

The technology was not like these days. Everything had to be developed or customized 'in-house.' There were no cellular communications or internet, and we worked only on adapting commercial radios and the first microcontrollers.

Product innovations were vital in this journey. However, I would like to point out a major innovation in service: remote maintenance of equipment, with 24/7 intervention possibilities and the following guarantee of real-time data collection.

It was this innovative approach, and so the promise to always receive data, especially during emergencies, that made CAE one of the main players in the creation of the regional Decentralized Functional Centres network in the early 2000s.

Looking at the present day, what are the main advantages that innovation offers in the field of real-time monitoring?

Today, power consumption remains low, ensuring independence from the electrical grid, but, in addition, multiple transmission media can now operate simultaneously between measurement stations and control centres. This means higher reliability in data collection, with measurement update frequencies that are more suitable for monitoring intense and, in a sense, sudden and localized phenomena.

Furthermore, dataloggers are now equipped with powerful microprocessors, programmable to manage local alarm algorithms or scenario changes. In this way, where necessary, a monitoring station can evolve into a truly proactive territorial safeguard.

The wide use of wireless devices between sensors and dataloggers, or even between different dataloggers, extends the effectiveness of these solutions to many different risk scenarios and applications: from landslides and hydraulic works to flooded underpasses and urban flash floods.

The availability of standard data sharing tools and software that, from the central centre, allow users to access data via any application and even on the move, completes the picture.

How does CAE address the topic of technological openness and overcoming lock-in in monitoring networks?

CAE Magazine dedicated an entire special article to overcoming technological lock-in.

When we decided to embrace the wave of technological openness back in 2014, we only partially understood the potential of this choice. We initially aimed to address the need to overcome lock-in, we achieved much more.

The development path CAE has followed until now, consolidating the second generation of technologies based on standards, interoperability, and programmability, has accelerated the creation of new functionalities. It has also simplified the integration of third-party sensors and components, allowing us to offer increasingly effective and performing solutions.

The modernization of monitoring networks in Italy is taking place progressively, also because the backward compatibility of all components allows even the oldest systems to be upgraded in successive steps.

The complete overcoming of lock-in occurs where latest-generation systems are operational, such as the one recently implemented in Calabria. In these cases, it is possible to use components from other manufacturers, such as dataloggers, to maintain and expand networks originally built by CAE.

From technologies to corporate skills: what is CAE’s capacity for maintaining monitoring networks based on other companies' technologies?

One of the most significant investments CAE has made in recent years concerns the ability of our technicians and the company to perform maintenance on monitoring networks built by other providers.

Today, we successfully manage the regional monitoring networks of Veneto and Puglia, which were previously upgraded and managed by other market operators. Among the many examples we could cite, we also maintain the ISPRA tide gauge monitoring network and the system in the Lombardy Region, where we have successfully learned to manage third-party dataloggers for monitoring numerous landslides.

We decided to invest in this direction after stepping back, a few years ago, from a maintenance tender for a major regional network. That network had been upgraded by a competitor just a few years earlier, with the goal of making it free from technological lock-in.

Only one operator participated in that public tender, the one that had performed the upgrade, while CAE, as we say in sports, was watching from the sidelines. We decided not to take any reckless risks and declined to participate, protecting our reputation but, more importantly, the safety of that Region’s citizens and the work of the client managing the network.

To continue with the sports metaphor, in the following years we trained hard to ensure we could compete with other public tenders involving the maintenance of equipment not of our own manufacture.

We utilized all the information clients provided about their systems, which were unfamiliar to us, and reconstructed the rest. We tested again and again until we successfully managed to use software, dataloggers, and sensors from other manufacturers. Only at that point did we step onto the field to play our game.

Yours is a very specialized sector, and you are the market leader. How does this "social role" of the company reflect in its daily management?

We are well aware that the effectiveness of our clients' decisions, the proper mitigation of risks, and consequently, the safety of citizens can depend on our work.

First of all, this awareness drives us to lead technological development with investments that have positive impacts on the entire sector. A prime example is our promotion of IP standards for communication between control centres and monitoring stations.

In addition, we always stand by our clients, providing them with professional assistance not only through the standard project implementation phases, from reporting to managing permits and construction sites,alsoantly, during the most critical moments, such as emergencies.

We believe that the key to success for a company like ours is the ability to face great challenges with a sense of responsibility. The ability to adapt to any context to meet client needs is not the result of improvisation; it is the result of foresight, planning, continuous training, hard work, and, above all, investments.

Edited by the CAE Magazine Editorial Staff