Lazio Region: green light to the evolution of the remote measurement network

The activity carried out by the Department for Civil Protection of Lazio’sRegion is crucial: monitoring meteorological and hydrological phenomena in progress and assessingrisks associated with them, in order to coordinate emergency interventions, make warning messages circulate, arrange operational interventions, as well as store and process the collected data for climatological analysis and spread data to the public. Therefore, aiming at real-time monitoring, the remote measurement system must meet needs of reliability, robustness and operational continuity in order to comply with relevant regulations and tasks of the Regional Functional Centre.

Lazio Region has 238 automatic remote measurement stations on its territory. There are sensors to measure many different meteorological parameters (the main ones are: rainfall, level and flow rate of water courses): in fact, as many as 200 stations are equipped with rain gauges and the network operates, as a whole, with 82 hydrometers.

Moreover, a flow detection system has been implemented on 10 hydrometric stations based on the combined use of an ultrasonic hydrometric sensor and a doppler radar sensor for measuring surface speed.

Through LazioCrea Company, LazioRegion has recently equipped itself with a digital radio communication system, homogeneous in architecture and operation, subservient to the 118 Health Emergency and Civil Protection services.  Aiming at efficiency and cost containment in the long term, the Regional Department for Civil Protection has decided to use this radio communication system as a communication channel for the data of the meteorological and hydropluviometric monitoring network. Then LazioCrea Company itself run the tender procedure awarded to CAE.

Among the advantages on which the chosen architecture is based is the standardization of peripheral radio components, compliant with the European DMR standard, which will ensure the Administration the possibility of having a plurality of suppliers. In fact, the renewal of some components of the regional monitoring system allows to achieve the aim of making the aforementioned system open, in other words free from an exclusively owned or little-known technology, thus facilitating competition between market operators that are able to carry out activities of supply, assistance and maintenance, as well as contain management costs.

Firstly, CAE will draw up the final design, including all possible adjustments and variations in the making, then it will move on to the important phase of the evolutionary maintenance of telecommunication technologies, peripheral stations and central software and hardware. 

Secondly, the new radio network will be built to integrate the already existing regional microwave network. All stations will be equipped with DMR terminals, as well as a cellular back-up module. Consistently, the network infrastructure will be implemented with broadcasting systems based on Trunking DMR Tier III radio technology in UHF band forradio singal’s broadcasting to all peripheral stations. Finally, with the aim of ensuring the efficiency and effectiveness of the network, the already existing regional trunking will be used for transport connections between the various loudspeakers and the control centre, via standard Ethernet Layer 2 IP links.

The radio modem devices will allow transparent communication in terms of data flows in and out of each pair of radio modems. All the protocols used, from a physical to an application level, such as USB, Ethernet, IP, UDP and CoAP, are standard protocols widely documented in the literature, and framed in the ISO/OSI model as far as standardization is concerned.

The technical choice of the UDP transport standard, based on IP standards, will also allow us to optimize data traffic and reduce latency times. The system provided presents a remarkable level of innovation thanks to the use of the CoAP, a protocol belonging to the "Internet of Things" family. By choosing CAE offer the Administration will have the possibility to maximize its investment, as at the end of the adaptation works it will count on a forward-looking system, which communicates not only with devices within the same network, but also with any kind of device through the logic of the Internet. 

At the end of the update, all 238 peripheral stations will be equipped with modern CompactPlus datalogger. This new CAE product is based on a Linux embedded operating system and a powerful integrated webserver, in order to guarantee not only reliability, computing power and programmability, but also interoperability and openness. Many other components of the peripheral stations will be updated, including all battery and solar cell power systems, as well as 45 integrated webcams.

Another valuable element of CAE’s offer is the ad hoc creation of an information system to support CFR (Regional Functional Centre) staff, that is to say, the development of a new computer infrastructure which is fully compatible with the infrastructure platform made available by the Contracting Company. Software for: network management, data’s displaying in cartographic, graphic and tabular form, managing alarms and processing historical series and records. It should be noted that almost all the proposed applications have a web-based architecture.

During this phase of technological updating, CAE will guarantee assistance and maintenance of the various software and/or hardware components of the existing hydrometeorological monitoring system, as they are gradually updated and until of successful testing.

After the successful testing and the placing into service of the new system, a 27-month assistance and maintenance period will begin for the entire hydrometeorological monitoring system and computer system. In addition to providing strict intervention times for blocking malfunctions, this service also provides that CAE will take care of all restoration interventions resulting from exceptional causes, such as theft, robbery, fire, atmospheric events, earthquake, vandalism, accidental damage caused by third parties or animals, turmoil, riots, acts of terrorism and sabotage.

Moreover, a particularly important phase of the project is the one dedicated to training the personnel assigned to operate on the proposed hydrometeorological monitoring system; this training phase is essential to make the Administration more and more autonomous in managing the various functions.

During all the activities provided for in the contract, CAE is also responsible for any disposal of the equipment/systems currently in use, where requested by the contracting Company.



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