As citizens, we depend upon the infrastructure provided by transportation networks, municipal operations, buildings, facilities and campuses, public utilities and Smart Cities for just about everything. The more efficiently they are run, the greater their contribution to increasing the health, safety and well-being of everyone who uses them.

Addressing critical infrastructure challenges such as urbanisation, overpopulation, pollution, congestion and security require complex networks that have to operate efficiently, safely and effectively. However, a rapid increase in sub-systems, hardware devices, connected and manually intensive data sources, as well as operational silos, ask for a different approach to solving the interconnected challenges which infrastructure operators are so often confronted with.

To Systems Engineers, systems thinking is not a novel concept. At the heart of any well-designed monitoring and control system lies a deep understanding of the way components interact, interrelate and interdepend to form a complex and unified system. In the complex world of smart infrastructure, the necessity for systems thinking has never been more crucial.

From Smart Cities to campus administration, integrated traffic control to smart airport operations – in order to derive pertinent operational insights, a single view of the interaction between people, processes and technology is a necessity.

Gautrain is a state-of-the-art commuter service, which connects OR Tambo international airport and the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria. It is the busiest transport hub in our country. The construction of the Gautrain project entailed overcoming geological, as well as logistical challenges. It involved having to tunnel under and through some of the most populated business centres in SA.

Transnet comprises the largest and most crucial part of the freight logistics chain that delivers goods to each and every citizen of South Africa. On a daily basis, through its pipelines and both to and from its ports, Transnet delivers thousands of tons of goods across South Africa. The transport giant then moves that cargo on to ships for export, while it unloads goods imported from abroad.

One of Transnet’s most significant achievements is the 860 km rail link between the Sishen iron ore mine in the Northern Cape and the Port of Saldanha on the West Coast. These trains measure nearly 4 km in length and weigh over 40 000 tons. More than 3,000 of these RDP trains have been in operation since their launch in December 2007.

Several factors, such as capital budget restrictions, ageing infrastructure, stricter environmental policies, as well as dynamic security concerns hamper the ability of infrastructure operators to meet the service levels their customers expect.

More and more, such operators are applying technological solutions, such as IoT, Cloud, Big Data, Analytics, Mobility and Digital Twins, to transform the asset lifecycles and operations of their infrastructure.

AVEVA’s capabilities in monitoring and control, engineering and design, asset performance and operations optimisation is an ideal fit for cities, power utilities, water and wastewater utilities, campus and facility managers, transportation operators as well as data centres who are looking to digitally transform their operations in order to save costs, reduce risk, as well as optimise performance and speed crisis response.

Make more informed decisions faster, increase the speed of crisis response, minimise operational costs and energy consumption, reduce risk to employees, assets and users and enable an efficient, mobile workforce by applying AVEVA’s digital transformation solutions.