Intelligent Data Engineering for Infrastructure Operations

Infrastructures affect the society by providing crucial services that enhance quality of life and enable economic activities. Infrastructure operations are responsible for managing the continual day-to-day responsibilities of these services, such as railway signalling, power transmission switching, and telecoms call switching. While operations can be seen as a way of keeping the system as it should be, incidents can still occur that require attention. Operations rely on humans to interpret information in order to understand the full situation and take appropriate actions for the system to return to a healthy state; people are thus central to operations.

For system operations to be effective, trustworthy information must be available and consequently, accurate data contributing to this information is needed. Such data is managed by a data engineering layer, which establishes reliable and efficient methods for collecting, processing, managing, and distributing data. This data engineering layer uses various intelligent techniques that apply machine learning algorithms to provide more insightful information to operations and improve the system operation process. An overview of the data engineering layer is proposed, covering foundational principles and reference architectures, as well as the role of data engineering in operations and reliability.