Vegetation management has always remained a complex challenge for utilities across the globe. As extreme weather events become commonplace, we have had more instances where falling trees disrupt railway and power lines. Utility providers have to be increasingly proactive in removing troublesome vegetation. The increasing inspection costs have facilitated the need for more automated monitoring solutions that provide fast, reliable insights.
Geospatial technology is paving the way to solve this problem – many companies across the globe have started leveraging earth observation data to provide advanced monitoring systems. LiveEO is one such solution provider, offering large-scale infrastructure monitoring solutions for utility companies.
In a joint webinar with UP42 this month, Sven Przywarra, the Co-Founder of LiveEO narrated the story of how his team built a fully automated infrastructure monitoring system for utility companies. We look at some of the core challenges that LiveEO faced along their growth journey, and how UP42’s geospatial platform enabled them to scale globally over the past four years.
Data selection & acquisition challenges
Utilities often have complex, distributed infrastructure networks that are spread over entire countries. For consistently monitoring such vast networks, satellite constellations with wide coverage and frequent revisits become the obvious choice.
But selecting and acquiring the right kind of satellite data can be a highly complex process. A majority of utility operators often require data from multiple satellite constellations – a combination of different temporal, spectral, and spatial resolutions that can yield the best results. These different satellite constellations often come with inherent image quality differences. It takes a lot of time and effort for geospatial engineers to sift through different sets of satellite data to select the right combination that they are looking for.
Data acquisition is an even bigger challenge. There is no standard API that can be used across multiple satellite data sets. This poses a major challenge for geospatial engineers since they have to make significant changes to their infrastructure to integrate data from every new provider.
The data ordering process is often done manually, costing a lot of valuable time in a domain where up-to-date insights are often required. The utility providers are often charged based on the AOI (Area of Interest) that they are looking for. If a certain AOI doesn’t have any associated satellite data, new imagery needs to be ordered by tasking a satellite constellation. This is an expensive process that is further complicated by other factors like weather conditions and cloud cover.
The solution offered by UP42
Despite these hurdles, LiveEO has continued to grow and build a fully automated monitoring system for utility companies. In the webinar, Sven talks about the role that UP42 played in helping LiveEO overcome some significant scaling challenges.
With a geospatial platform and marketplace offering more than 150 data sources and algorithms, UP42 simplifies the satellite data purchase process for companies like LiveEO. The one-stop geospatial platform provides access to both historical imagery, as well as offering the option to order new imagery through satellite tasking. The AOI-based pricing works together with a pay-as-you-go model to create a flexible purchase model for companies seeking access to geospatial data. Very often, solution providers have to create highly custom solutions that are tailored to their customer’s specific use cases.
The developer-first platform provided by UP42 offers the foundation for such custom use cases – a mature API and SDK ecosystem that lets customers like LiveEO build custom solutions for their end customers. This ecosystem is also truly data agnostic, allowing LiveEO to easily order data from multiple satellite providers without making any changes to their existing infrastructure.
By integrating the power of satellite data with their in-house AI processing algorithms, LiveEO shows how companies can solve major infrastructure challenges with satellite data. 
Check out the full webinar here.
