Environmental Data Monitoring System Bd Sim V.11

Environmental data monitoring system BD-SIM v.11

Virgil Petrescu*, Viorel Marinescu*, Mariana Marinescu**

* Professor, PhD

** Senior Lecturer, PhD

Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest

B-dul Lacul Tei nr. 124, sector 2, Bucharest, Romania

1. Background

Tha BD-SIM (data base attached to the informational system for the environment) was created during 1992-1993, and implemented in all Romanian environmental county agencies in consecutive version (the last one was the version V 3.4), on RDBMS dBase IV.

2. Informational system of environment

The Informational System for the Environment – ISE (or SIM for the Romanian acronym of Sistem Informational pentru Mediu) is a multi-component system having several one-or two connections with other systems co-existing onto the same (country’s) territory or outside. Its development has been based on thorough analyses and surveys, polls and appraisals, carried out by multi-disciplinary teams.

The SIM was build up of four component sub-systems, corresponding to the four main factors of the environment: air, water, soil and biota (flora and fauna). Among these four sub-systems inter-dependency links that make them a complex system as shown in fig. 1.

The SIM has included, from its initiation, all the basic indicators for the state of the environment, as they are defined and routinely measured for the component subsystems in a number of 500 stations and/or points, all over the country.

Fig. 1 – The system of environment components and indicators

3. The need for an integrated system – decision support in environment protection

An information system developed as a decision support tool for environment management and protection has to respond, in general, to the following tasks:

provide complete, reliable and timely information and knowledge, in a conveniently processed form, concerning the state of environment over a specific area or geographic zone;

provide data and information needed in risk analyses and environmental impact assessment for various situations;

provide necessary data and information to evaluate the compliance with legal previsions for environment protection;

provide data and information needed in building, calibrating and use of simulation models and in new numerical modeling known as Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) applied in various environment related studies. Obviously, it follows from the above listed requirements, that a database should not be considered as a simple means to collect and store data.

In line with above listed requirements and comments, the database attached to the environment information system, BD-SIM, has been continually developed and upgraded, through a series of versions. Further and more important developments, could only be obtained by linking the database with GIS and modelling packages into an integrated information system as shown in fig. 2.

Fig. 2 – Architecture of integrated information system for decision support in environment protection

4. BD – SIM in progress

The BD-SIM has been designed and developped as a hierarchically distributed data base. The architecture of BD-SIM has been concieved considering the functional structure of the informational system and the geographical distribution of the SIM. From the point of view of the functional structure of the informational system, the BD-SIM is made up of the data bases for each of the main components (sub-systems) of the system: air, water, soil, biota (fauna and flora), and a separate component database for radioactivity.

The relational model has been used for the logical data-structures and languages in developping BD-SIM, due to obvious advantages.

New BD-SIM version have been developped by internal research programs of Hydrotechnical Faculty (Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest) using RDBMS Visual Fox(v.4-v.10). At present, for BD-SIM v.11, RDBMS Oracle 9i is used. The “WATER” environmental data were introduced in the first version of the BD-SIM Informatics’ System. Later, in 1999 and 2000 years, a research team from the ex-Ministry of Environment has generated and introduced measurement data in the system “AIR”.

The data base system, BD-SIM v.11 ( data bases, relation data base management system, the attached informatics applications), has a few special features:

a) the usage of relational distributed data bases (they were designed and used under RDBMS Oracle 9i under the Windows operating system);

b) the data bases can be used by a variety of application programs (including mathematical modeling programs), relevant in pollution analysis and for the foundation of environment protection decisions, for which, a generic model of environment data has been created, which can be completed without modifying these applications;

c) the insurance of partitioned access to the data;

d) it allows the access to other data bases or SQL servers, by developing client/server applications;

e) it can be developed as a multi-data base system, allowing the access to data bases (part of BD-SIM) stored on computers in different geographical areas, as if they were a single data base;

f) it allows for the query of a part of data bases via the Internet;

g) it connects with GIS-type systems through ODBC translators (open data base connectivity) and DDE channels ( dynamic data exchange);

h) it creates conditions for the integration with other systems for the surveillance and protection of the environment, in the European space or in a global environment monitoring system such as GEMS;

i) the development of informatics applications in the Java technology for the access through the Internet to the environment data;

j) the development of e-kiosc type applications in connection with GIS systems for making available public environment data over the Internet.

Nowadays, unfortunately, the data base maintenance is very poor, without decision makers’ support. We underline that modern recording equipment exist, but with manual or semi-informational data processing, although BD-SIM has a series of applications for automated primary processing.

A series of numerical experiments has been done by a research team of Hydrotechnical Faculty for complex environmental data processing (time-series, neural networks, genetic models a.s.o.).

5. Use of ANN modeling in the analysis and forecasting values of water quality parameters

The new numerical modeling paradigm known as Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) offers an alternative solution to such kind of problems. An ANN model can be seen as an oriented graph with many connections and weighting coefficients, attached to these connections, which can perform a distributed and parallel processing of I/O data. Thus it is creating an internal numerical model of a particular application, through a process of learning based on actual I/O data given as an example to be reproduced. These example-type data actually describe the way the modeled object works.

There are several types of ANN models being currently used for a wide range of problems. A widely used type is the so-called ANN mapping using the “back propagation” or 'counter propagation' learning models.

In our study we have used an ANN model of “back propagation” (BP) type to simulate a time-series model for one parameter (electrical conductivity) of our water quality problem. The data for these series refer to actual data measured on river Olt over the period 1995 – 1996. These data, which are stored in the section “WATER” of BD-SIM, have been measured with a frequency of 30 measurements per month. The results obtained for this time serie are shown in Fig. 3.

Fig. 3 – Results of ANN – BP modeling for electrical conductivity

6. Proposal for the future

A firm decision at national level for management and financial support in order to develop and re-implement BD-SIM in the Romanian environmental county agencies is very necessary.

It is an imperious necessity that a National Monitoring System for environmental data exists to be used for a better survey of environment protection, especially in the perspective of Romania’s integration into European Union.

The Romanian researchers have already demonstrated that they can solve this problem better, without the purchase of a foreign software.

References

Alexandru Mănescu, Mariana Burcea (Marinescu), Viorel Marinescu, Gabriel Ioniță – Banca de date distribuită atașată sistemului informațional – decizional pentru protecția mediului – “Mediul înconjurător” nr. 4/1994, ICIM – București.

Viorel Marinescu – Despre BD-SIM – “Mediul înconjurător” nr. 4/1994, ICIM – București.

Alexandru Mănescu, Mariana Burcea (Marinescu), Viorel Marinescu, Gabriel Ioniță – The informational system of environment on the development of an integrated system for decision support and management – Buletinul științific al UTCB/anul XXXVII, 1994, nr.1.

Alexandru Mănescu, Mariana Marinescu, Viorel Marinescu, Gabriel Ioniță – “Hydroinformatics” 94, AABalkema, Rotterdam, Brokfield, 1994.

Alexandru Mănescu, Mariana Burcea (Marinescu), Viorel Marinescu, Teodor Popescu – Liking an environmental data base with GIS an TS models – “Hydroinformatics”, ETH Zürich, Switzerland/AABarkema/Rotterdam, 1996.

Alexandru Mănescu, Florin Ionescu, Mariana Burcea (Marinescu), Viorel Marinescu, Cosmin Barbu – Informatic system for water quality protection in a river basin area – Proceedings of the International Conference, “Hydroinformatics ‘98”, Copenhaga, Danemarca 1998.

Mariana Marinescu – Modele matematice în sistemul informațional al supravegherii și protecției mediului – teză de doctorat, UTCB, București, 1998.

Mariana Marinescu, Viorel Marinescu, Cosmin Barbu, Florin Gheorghe Filip – Spatial decision support szstems and their applications to environment – related problema – Proceedings of Western Multi Conference ’99, San Francisco, California, USA, 1999.

Viorel Marinescu, Mariana Marinescu, Elena Dumitrache, Sorin Dumitrache – Prelucrarea unor indicatori de stare ai factorilor de mediu folosind modele matematice – informatice cu rețele neuronale, Proceedings The 9-th ICSI Conference PROGRESS IN CYOGENICS AND ISOTOPES SEPARATION, Căciulata, România, 2003.

Viorel Marinescu, Mariana Marinescu, Elena Dumitrache, Sorin Dumitrache – SIARCU v 5.0 ORACLE – Sistem informatic pentru răspuns în caz de urgență pe platforme industriale, Proceedings The 9-th ICSI Conference PROGRESS IN CYOGENICS AND ISOTOPES SEPARATION, Căciulata, România, 2003.