Overall concept underpinning CUTLER

Overall concept

The coast, used here to refer to the area around the water element, is a dynamic place and its dynamism makes it susceptible to stresses and changes in a number of ways. Since it is the place where the land interacts with the water, it is open to the action of wind, waves, tides, and currents that may not only erode the waterfront or the river basis but also can expand it with sedimentary deposits. In addition, social and economic forces also bring stresses to coastal areas. Population growth, land development, and resort development are all particularly intense along these areas, which experience high growth rates. Finally, development along these areas can be also vulnerable to hurricanes, nor‘easters, and other kinds of severe weather phenomena.

Despite the aforementioned facts, trends demonstrate that these areas continue to attract people and drive urban development. However, it is very important for the policies governing the patterns of development along these areas to be properly designed and implemented so as to avoid the degradation of these areas in terms of property, habitat, and life.

The concept underpinning CUTLER is to guide decision makers, citizens, public officials and planners in the development of policies that build community, enrich the economy, and protect the environment. This guidance should promote the idea of shared values – protecting habitat while preserving public open space and maintaining access for everyone. In addition, it should also respect the economic value that a certain property derives from being close to the water element, while at the same time respecting the value of this area as a common amenity. Policies adhering to local planning, building regulation, economic development, infrastructure management, environmental control and recreation facilities need to strike the right balance so as to achieve this goal.


Big-data driven policy making methodology

The proposed methodology foresees the use of CUTLER platform to facilitate the decision required to reach the strategic goals of each city that reflect the vision and priorities of the administration. More specifically, CUTLER will be used to decide on the administration’s technical program that defines the projects, policies and programs to be implemented during the forthcoming years. In particular, our platform will facilitate the design, execution and evaluation of the technical program in the following aspects:

  • Inform: Extract and present the evidence that are necessary for policy makers to make informed decisions when defining the projects, policies and programs incorporated in their technical program.
  • Advise: Apply a “Resiliency Lens” that will present the decision makers with the estimated impact on their planned activities on the resiliency status of their city.
  • Monitor: Rely on the data obtained from the sensing infrastructures and use the data mining and visualization tools to establish a set of monitoring mechanisms. These monitor mechanisms will be able to spot whether there are any significant changes taking place, as a result of the enforced policies.
  • Evaluate: Building on the information gathered through the monitoring mechanisms define a set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that would allow quantifying and assessing the impact of the enforced policies. These KPIs will serve as the criteria for success or failure of the enforced policies.
  • Revise: Depending on the value of KPIs revise the projects, policies and programs for next years’ technical program considering also the weaknesses that has caused certain policies to fail.

In facilitating this process CUTLER will adopt the IAMER (Inform-Advice-Monitor-Evaluate-Revise) approach for developing a multi-faceted dashboard using open data from existing infrastucture. This dashboard will be composed of five different facets, each one corresponding to each of the aforementioned methodological steps. The purpose of each facet will be to present the information and extract the insights that are necessary for the decision makers to perform the aforementioned methodological steps. As part of the IAMER approach and the developed dashboard, we also plan to introduce a number of business logic rules for guiding the decision makers through the process of policy development.