Norwegian Land Stability Monitoring

The customer’s need

To implement an IoT-based monitoring system to monitor the stability of land in remote areas of Norway with reduced or no cell phone network coverage and where there is a demonstrably high risk of water-induced landslides.  The system needed to have low power consumption, long durability and low maintenance in harsh conditions, and support a very reliable and secure data transfer from sensors to users.

Our solution

The Insight Platform deployed for NVE has three key components:

⁃ Edge-based hardware, data collection, aggregation and data transfer

⁃ Cloud-based Insight Platform for near real-time data processing and management

⁃ Web-based customizable dashboard for visualization of remotely collected data which has been validated, enriched, curated and securely stored.

The Insight Platform is built on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure, and by virtue of its microservices architecture provides high levels of scalability, availability, security, integration, and data management to users anywhere in the world. A key element of the Insight Terra solution is the combination of AWS services that support the Insight data management platform - within the AWS Virtual Private Cloud, Insight Terra utilises the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud, Container Service for Kubernetes, Relational Database Service, Key Management Service and a number of other specialised services to enable Insight Terra to provide an agile, secure and trustworthy data management service to NVE.

To address the need for reliable and resilient communications at this remote location, the solution also incorporates an all-weather telecommunications kiosk. The kiosk houses the edge compute node, power storage/management, LoRaWAN gateway and Inmarsat satellite terminal, and is supported by dual wind-turbines and PV solar arrays for totally independent remote operation.

How is NVE benefiting from our solution?

NVE wishes to enhance its existing landslide warning system and will investigate the potential of the Insight Platform to improve the accuracy of the current system. To assist NVE with this evaluation, SINTEF is performing a range of data analytics on the sensor data received by the Insight Platform to calibrate the NVE landslide prediction model.  This analysis is intended to detect and quantify the response of groundwater conditions to both rainfall and snowmelt, within a landslide risk assessment framework, thus ensuring more reliable and consistent landslide predictions and improved risk management.

SINTEF has assessed the Insight Terra Insight Platform and its integrated resilient Inmarsat satellite connectivity as an:

“[...] innovative IoT technology development that will add real value to NVE’s operational capability to monitor geo-hazards in remote and inaccessible areas.”.

Inmarsat

A UK-based global satellite communications operator that provides the resilient satellite connectivity and standalone power generation capability to this project.  

SINTEF

A broad-based Norwegian research institution that has experience supporting NVE on landslide monitoring projects, and utilizes the monitoring data to develop and implement risk mitigation measures for geohazards.

Geonor

A Norwegian geotechnical, hydrological and meteorological systems manufacturer, integrator and service provider with experience of deploying LoRaWAN IoT solutions in the geohazard environment.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosts the Insight Platform in its Virtual Private Cloud infrastructure.  AWS is the world’s most comprehensively and broadly adopted cloud computing service provider, offering compute, storage, databases, machine learning and AI, data lakes and analytics, and IoT services. AWS core infrastructure is flexible and secure, built to satisfy government, military and banking requirements.