INTEGRATED URBAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

INTRODUCTION

Today’s urban areas are sustained by a diverse, interconnected system of tightly woven infrastructure networks that provide resources, manage wastes, and support transportation and communication. Much like the arteries of an organism, these networks support urban areas by delivering energy and resources to the areas in which they are used. Supporting the world’s vast and rapidly growing urban populations into the future will require sustainable, systems-driven approaches in the design and control of urban resource networks.

Urban systems of the future demand that we move beyond efficient management of resources to provide means for harvesting resources from waste or otherwise under-utilized resource streams to create efficient and sustainable closed-loop solutions. While by-products and waste of otherwise efficient systems have been traditionally discarded or ignored, an intelligent urban infrastructure harvests, collects, and recaptures these wastes to produce valuable resources for use or reuse within the system.

The goal of urban metabolism research at USF is to explore and develop the resource management strategies of the Tampa Campus, utilizing the campus as a living laboratory. This research will aid in the development of efficient resource management strategies and will promote the harvesting of resources from nature, waste, or otherwise under-utilized resource streams with the goal of closing resource flow loops. To achieve this goal, an integrated urban resource management model will be developed that will be driven by sensory technology and will in turn drive a spatial visualization tool.

Our vision is for the USF Tampa Campus to be an intelligent and efficient example of both a campus and a city of the future.

SMART SENSOR INSTALLATION

This project will allow the USF Tampa Campus to be an intelligent and efficient model-campus through the implementation of a network of smart sensors. To become an intelligent campus, resource networks will be monitored at both the sub-system and campus-system levels, and feedback from intelligence layers will actively manage the use of resources on campus.

INTEGRATED RESOURCE MANAGEMENT MODEL

Information collected from the smart sensors network will then be organized, processed, and stored within an integrated resource model. This model will incorporate sensory data into individual network models – such as water, energy, and transportation network models – and then link together these network models to create a system-wide resource model. This system model, responsive to real-time input, will drive the spatial resource visualization tool and will intelligently manage campus resource networks.

SPATIAL VISUALIZATION TOOL

The spatial visualization tool will animate resource flows across campus, creating an interactive foresight workspace where campus users, researchers, experts, and USF stakeholders and policy-makers can conduct scenario analysis and foresight studies on alternate futures. The tool can be able to assist in problems such as classroom space allocations to reduce student transportation and building energy demands, the location and design of new pedestrian infrastructure or the identification of areas that would benefit from increased vegetation to decrease urban heat island effect. This spatial visualization tool can also be used to visualize the current state of the campus system to assist in the daily operation and maintenance of the campus.