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August 2006 Project of the Month: E2SP

E2SP – Environmental Enterprise Service Provider

Issues being addressed

Pollution has high social costs: quality of environment, quality of life and health must play a primary role in sustainable development. Given the heightened awareness of the general public to these issues, the E2SP (Environmental Enterprise Service Provider) project aims to provide comprehensive consolidated information feedback on local performance to local citizens; thereby further increasing awareness and community values.

While at the beginning of the 80s there was the need to measure the environmental conditions, now the focus has been moved towards the evaluation and effectiveness of environmental policies. E2SP offers a highly original approach to these activities through the use of cutting edge information technologies, as it is based on the first environmental information system which combines the advantages of first-rate consolidated technology and innovative architecture tailored to environmental data management.

According to the Europe-wide adopted DPSIR (Driving force – Pressure – State – Impact – Response) model and the legislative framework, all the environmental agencies in the Member States are in charge of measuring the state of the environment and evaluate the Impact; this implies data analysis and reporting activity.

These features support efficiently the daily activities of different environmental public and private institutions, on different geographic scales from regional to local. Moreover, the sharing of a common set of operative and analytical tools and the usage of the same semantics can foster the adoption of homogeneous procedures for environmental decision support also at trans-boundary level.

The E2SP platform delivers the above listed functionalities as services via Internet, according to the ASP model. The services are supplied by two service centres, whose architecture is based upon a Warehouse platform. They integrate the heterogeneous data coming from the operative level into a remote and homogeneous data repository. These data are processed by the analytical tools for advanced reporting and statistical analysis, and by forecasting modelling tools. The access to the E2SP system is realized trough a Web Enterprise Portal.

Objectives of the project

The E2SP project aims at validating the viability of the ASP model for an environmental data management service, by testing two service centres, one in Italy and the second in Poland, collecting environmental data and supplying value added services such as query and reporting, data analysis, forecast, scenarios via the Internet. The business case is in air quality management, extended to traffic and noise. The pilot users are the Municipality of Bari (Italy) and the Environmental Inspectorate of Upper Silesia (WIOS- Poland), with the scientific support of the University of Bari and the Polish Academy of Sciences (IPIS-PAN) and Aria.

Services

E2SP services in the air quality domain are provided via the Internet portal in ASP mode and they include:

Configurable Query and Reporting
Air quality data analysis
Environmental data export
Emission inventory display
Modelling and forecast of air pollutants concentrations
Geo-referenced and thematic representations
E-Learning
Environmental Portal
Content management

The environmental data analyses can be used to support environmental management, planning and decision-making; in particular, decision makers can:

create new combinations of operators according to various space-time aggregation criteria,
investigate data according to “free” and personalized analytical paths,
view, build and consult reports in graphic and/or table format in dynamic mode.

E2SP provides model services for:

Evaluation of traffic pollutants concentrations in urban areas and close to main roads;
Evaluation of photochemical pollution on relatively wide areas;
Evaluation of pollutant concentrations due to industrial settlements.

Achievements

The service centres in Italy and Poland have been active since July 2005, providing data analysis and forecast services for air quality management to Bari Municipality and to Upper Silesia Environmental Agencyon daily basis . Other public authorities decided to provide data to the service centres, hence enlarging the market validation and creating a wider basis for service deployment. Industrial partnerships for commercial distribution and for a wider service range are in progress and the services have been presented to National Authorities and in several international events (EnviroInfo2005 in Brno, Czech Republic – Pollutec in Paris - ATVN conference in Pultusk, Poland - TAU International in Milano, Italy - eValues in Bled, Slovenia - iemms2006 in Burlington, USA – EnviroInfo2006 in Graz, Austria).

Expected benefits by the end of the project

The main advantages offered by E2SP are:

short start-up time
reduction in the time and cost of advanced data analyses,
reduction in the time and cost of producing non-predefined reports,
upgrade and optimisation of the experts’ analytical capabilities,
vision and integrated analysis of the information (data, indicators, indices, forecasts) that can be used to manage the environment effectively,
reduced costs Total Costs of Ownership.

The E2SP system offers the needed flexibility to users in order to adapt it very easily to local needs and “business models”, independently from the geographical coverage, through:

Adherence to EC regulation
Configurable reporting and data analysis common user interface and user procedures
Sharing of the same data analysis and presentation tools
Scalable services and business model (a “pay per use” concept) adaptable to user dimension (sustainability).

The partners

Reference Data

Project's website: http://e2sp.esaprojekt.pl
Contract Type: Market Validation
Start Date: March 2005
End Date: August 2006
Duration: 18 Months
Contact: mauro.cislaghi@p-a.it