Surbana Jurong Revolutionizes Urban Planning Data With Real-Time Analytics
How Singapore’s Largest Architect Group Shipped a Major New Data Pipelining Service In Less Than a Year With TechnoIdentity.
Surbana Jurong Group is a global urban, infrastructure and managed services consulting firm, with over 70 years of track record in successful project delivery. Headquartered in Singapore, the group has a global talent pool of 16,500 across Surbana Jurong and member companies based in more than 120 offices in over 40 countries.
For a smart city project, Surbana Jurong was made the lead consultant in planning, urban design, and conducting economic studies, positioning and infrastructure / industrial estate planning. They were tasked to create master plans for the capital region, the capital city, and seed development to achieve six goals which are part of the resilience and regeneration plans for the city: jobs and homes for all, a world-class infrastructure, a clean and green city, efficient resource management, and identity and heritage.
With over 7,000 square kilometers of land use for the capital region, urbanization was projected to impact a population of 49.4 million.
As part of the project, urban analytics was central to shaping and running smart cities. The availability of real-time data and the necessary computing power continue to increase, so does the possibility of detecting patterns in everyday life of urban systems and developing applications that respond to these patterns in real-time.
Major modules include Land Allocation & Management System, Asset Management, ePlanning (urban scenario planning), Citizen portal and Analytics. These systems employed analytics to predict traffic congestion, transportation hubs, water, and sewage lines, efficient use of road space, land usage, catchment analysis on amenities, top-line statistics of green/blue network and road network, to name a few. This could support a wide range of use cases where comprehensive, real-time data on urban populations unlocked huge opportunities.
From Thought to Delivery in Less than Twelve Months
With the vision set to create a data analytics platform that could deliver detailed analysis at city scale, TechnoIdentity set out to build the platform that could provide these new data services.
In a mere twelve-month period, our team achieved in delivering all the primary modules. Much of the astonishing speed of developer innovation in building this new product platform can be attributed to some key technology choices.
The volume of data, the requirement for real-time computation, and the associated performance requirements immediately led the team to Apache Spark at the big data processing layer. The platform also needed to match the stringent quality of service expectations (high availability, reliability, resilience under peak usage, etc.). The DevOps team established a strong CI/CD pipeline and enabled us with an anytime deploy model, thus contributing in a big way to the delivery’s agileness.
Our open-source react component library devfractal ensured we could scale the frontend team to deliver screens rapidly without compromising on type safety and performance.