Mott MacDonald and Microsoft have teamed up to create a cloud-based smart infrastructure platform that will use 'asset performance modelling, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence'.
The system is designed to help asset owners, cities and governments by assisting with decision-making and asset management, and providing a better understanding of where resources and investments should be made.
Oliver Hawes, Mott MacDonald’s head of smart infrastructure, said: 'Smart infrastructure combines deep domain knowledge, digital technology and outcomes-based thinking to turn data into meaningful information that reveals new insights and empowers decision-making to generate much better results.
'It is vital that smart infrastructure delivers social, economic and environmental benefits for society, as well as investment return for businesses.'
Mott MacDonald will move its cloud-based analytics and digital twin platform – named Moata – to Microsoft’s Azure.
The Moata platform is already used by the City Council in Auckland, New Zealand (pictured) to engage with its customers by improving the accuracy of water quality predictions and the associated public health risk from less than 20% to greater than 80%.
The city-scale digital twin represents the real-time interaction between atmospheric conditions, the urban stormwater and wastewater networks and the marine environment, Mott MacDonald said.
Moata helps Auckland City Council increase levels of engagement with the public and make better informed decision driving improved outcomes for the community across the entire £2.6bn stormwater asset base.
Trudy Norris-Grey, global managing director of local and regional government and CityNext at Microsoft, said: 'This is the first time Microsoft has partnered with a company like Mott MacDonald which is not only leading the way in developing smart infrastructure but is actually implementing that technology to improve people’s lives through better decision making today.'
In a statement Mott MacDonald said it would collaborate on projects for current and prospective clients, using Azure’s 'continuous multi-layered security, to enable benefits to be realised and shared at scale - over one billion data points per day and counting'.
