Portugal tests anti-nuclear technology in Gaia and Guimarães
It’s called InfraCrit and it’s already being tested in Guimarães and Gaia, in partnership with the National Civil Protection Authority, counting until September with 725 thousand euros.
Co-financed by Portugal 2020/FEDER, this is a project that aims to create an intelligent system for the protection and management of critical urban infrastructures in the face of extremes, such as floods, fires, earthquakes, industrial or industrial incidents and accidents.
“The objective is to safeguard health, energy, transport, telecommunications and distribution systems, among others, in order to minimize human and material concerns around the world”, explain, in a statement, the universities of Minho and Coimbra, which is associated with the company PH Informática in the development of InfraCrit.
“This innovation will manage key infrastructures according to criticality indexes, temporal evolution and impact assessment, in addition to simulating accidents of natural or human origin, allowing to quickly establish measures for forecasting, mitigation, action and increased redundancy in those infrastructures”, José Campos and Matos, professor at the School of Engineering at the University of Minho and researcher at the Institute for Sustainability and Innovation in Structural Engineering (ISISE).
According to the InfraCriti consortium, this project by the promoter began in 2019 with the design of the platform architecture, conceived from the integration of modules for the different extreme events, including cyber-physical, now the validation pilot phase in the cities of Guimarães and Gaia, “due to its vulnerability to fire and flood, respectively”.
Campos e Matos can potentially protect the great activity in which “the well-being of a society is, to a large extent, a reflection of the better performance of its infrastructures in the different sectors not of”, underlining that, “in general, it is still “Efficient, collaborative and systematically these infrastructures face a possible bad weather or catastrophe, but we are on that path”.
For this academic official, “the effect of this new technology cannot increase cost reduction companies or reduction providers, but rather the reduction of costs and costs resulting from anticipation and prevention management”.
“Partial destruction results in most cases in the loss of human life, the worst of an incident, but also in maritime contours, from transport networks, road and road (air, road, rail and sea), wind, water , refineries, central technology centers (internet, computer centers, software) or (cultural, commercial, sports, financial buildings), thus generating social proposals and expenses more for the State and the private ones”, explains José Campos e Matos.
Hence, InfraCrit brings, therefore, “positive externalities and value creation for the entities that will use this tool”, he concludes.
This scientific project involves the Research & Innovation Department of PH Informática e Microssistemas, the Historical Structures and Masonry Group of ISISE-UMinho and the Software and Systems Engineering Group of the Informatics and Systems Center of the University of Coimbra.