AIT - Austrian Institutes of Technology GmbH (At)

Submitted by Admin on Wed, 19/09/2012 - 09:43

AIT Logo AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH (AIT) is Austria's largest, non-university research organization employing about 630 people. AIT (http://www.ait.ac.at ) is heavily engaged in contract research for government and industry producing an annual turnover of about 90 Mio Euro. The contract research of AIT is performed in its departments Health & Environment, Safety & Security (http://www.ait.ac.at/safety_security/safety_security_en.html) Mobility, Energy, Foresight & Policy Development (F&PD) (http://www.ait.ac.at/foresight_and_policy_development/).

International co-operations and the participation in a large number of research projects of the European Union maintain our international standard and give our customers the advantage of participating in latest research results of the international scientific community. In addition to this, AIT brings 20 years of experience with designing, building and operating environmental measurement networks- including both the technical knowledge needed to build and maintain the complete sensor network with accompanying software, and the good understanding of the end user needs. Our aim is to reach top leading positions in special segments such as highly flexible, scalable, secure, and robust environmental monitoring systems and to enhance these systems with semantic based discovery and value adding tools to open a broader market and new business opportunities to our customers. The aim of the spatial systems unit as part of the F&PD department is to support our customers in developing strategies aiming in sustainability, environmental quality and regional prosperity which will finally contribute to a further regional development of Austria.

Relevant experience

  • SANY (FP6- IST 033564) – Sensors anywhere is co-ordinated by AIT. The SANY integrated project focuses on interoperability of in-situ sensors and sensor networks. SANY Architecture will provide a quick and cost-efficient way to reuse of data and services from currently incompatible sensor- and data- sources.
  • ORCHESTRA (FP6-511678) – Open Architecture and Spatial Data Infrastructure for Risk Management. AIT is partner in the Architecture sub-project.
  • EMIKAT, an implementation of an emission inventory system for Upper Austria and Vienna. A future oriented database design is being implemented that allows a very flexible and transparent data-, model-, scenario-, user- and security management.
  • UWEDAT, an environmental monitoring system scalable for air quality monitoring, water monitoring as well as other environmental monitoring issues. Implementation from the sensor up to the whole monitoring network in the provinces of Upper Austria, Carinthia and Vienna.
  • reclip:more, a national project, where AIT has coordinated a regional climate simulation project, integrating all Austrian climate modeller teams in the project consortium and modelling the entire Greater Alpine region. (A further project - reclip:century - has started in 2008)
  • future.scapes, a scenario project dealing with regional transition regarding climate, demographics and landscape with stakeholder integration at different levels in Austria.
  • PLUREL (FP6–036921), a scenario-project, dealing with landscape modelling and impact assessment focusing on peri-urban land use relationships in entire Europe. AIT is concentrating on regional typology, response functions for population, traffic and industry as driver for land use related pressure.

Role in the consortium

Particular technical interest of AIT is in the area of TaToo’s Architecture, tagging tools and client developments, access to resources, integration of semantics into source systems, research and in semantic and security issues. Where in the related technical work packages (WP3, WP4) AIT is contributing. But, AIT’s major contribution, of course will be to WP1 and WP2. Considerable efforts will also go into WP5. That means that AIT will but most of its work into:

  • WP1: Management
  • WP2: Environment Analysis
  • WP5: Validation Scenarios: Implementation of “Climate Twin Regions - Discovery platform”

AIT is well linked via SANY to standardisation organisation like Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and is therefore interested in dissemination activities in this direction as well as in networking with other related communities as addressed by the International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems (ISESS) as well as International Environmental Modelling and Software Society (iEMSs) or the IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing). AIT will also exploit the project results commercially.

Responsibilities in the project:

  • Project Coordinator
  • WP1 Leader
  • WP2 Leader
  • Specification and implementation contributions to WP3 and WP4
  • Validation Scenario 1 Steward
  • Implementation of Validation Scenario 1 – “Climate Change Twin Regions – Discovery Platform”