IT Lessons Learnt from Real Time Dike Monitoring

The Dutch lowlands are protected by many kilometres of dikes. Currently these dikes are visually inspected on a regular basis. During heavy weather this frequency is raised, up to 24/7 in very extreme situations. After a dike failure at the Dutch town Wilnis in 2003, the question was raised whether modern sensor technology could be used to assess extra information on dike conditions. To answer this question, different experiments have been conducted in order to gain more knowledge about dike failure mechanisms and to validate real time sensor dike monitoring in existing dikes. Based on these use cases, this paper presents several IT lessons learnt and future IT challenges concerning data storage, anomaly detection and dike stability models in relation to CPU power usage for small, medium and large scale dike monitoring.