SIMPaCT – New South Wales’ coolest public park | University of Technology Sydney

Two people sitting in a park under some trees.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly playing a role in benefiting human lives and is now going to help make Bicentennial Park at Sydney Olympic Park a cool urban oasis.

SIMPaCT (Smart Irrigation Management for Parks and Cool Towns) is a partnership ISF is involved with between the NSW Government, several other universities and private industry.

It will merge environmental monitoring and AI across the popular 42-hectare parkland to provide the coolest possible microclimates for residents and visitors during increasingly hot summers.

It is a practical example to demonstrate how smart water management can ease the pressure on our most valuable natural resource. It is Australia’s largest smart green infrastructure project and a major leap forward in the development of heat-responsive urban design.

The Digital Restart Fund, administered by the Department of Customer Services of the NSW Government, will award $2.5 million to Sydney Olympic Park Authority to make SIMPaCT a reality.

This multidisciplinary partnership brings true innovation, cutting-edge science and technology, and ultimately greater climate resilience to Sydney Olympic Park, the state’s premier event destination.

The sensors in Bicentennial Park will record soil moisture and air temperature information and combine it with local weather forecasts. AI will then predict when and for how long different sections of the park need to be watered.

Installation of weather sensor. Photo: Tanya Xaybounheuang

This innovative project uses only recycled water and by evaluating how successful the irrigation management was in keeping defined soil moisture levels, the AI module learns over time how to provide optimal plant hydration.

Project creator and lead Dr Sebastian Pfautsch, Associate Professor at Western Sydney University believes this to be a breakthrough for the field.

This is not science fiction. This is real. The work helps to optimise microclimate and water use in summer. Our technology will be scalable, delivering maximum coolth from plants around buildings and parks anywhere – if you have enough water to irrigate.
– Dr Sebastian Pfautsch, UWS

Andrew Tovey:

Bicentennial Park at Sydney’s Olympic Park has some unique challenges with urban heat and irrigation. It's actually got one of the largest irrigation systems in the country but because it's uncapped landfill, the soil is really thin, so the plants are quite susceptible to drought. So, what we want to do is to turn to smart technology and sensor technology to see if we can improve the way the irrigation system runs.

Sebastian Pfautsch:

The project is called SIMPaCT, which stands for Smart Irrigation Management for Cool Parks and Towns and that's exactly what we're trying to do. Smarten up the irrigation system in this park. What this project is doing is making this irrigation system more effective and modifying how we are actually irrigating to give us the greatest cooling.

The work is important because our climate is getting hotter we need to find ways to cool our city down that are practical and that are actually efficient. There is something that's called the park cool island effect and we're trying to maximize it by optimally hydrating every plant throughout this whole park.

Andrew Tovey:

What we're actually deploying in the park is a network of what we call low-cost smart city sensors. So, there's two main types. There's a type like this, which measures the ambient temperature and humidity of the air, and we stick these up on poles or in trees at about three meters off the ground. So, in addition to this network of 50 smaller sensors we've, actually got 13 weather stations and they're measuring meteorological variables like wind and rain and sunlight so that we can start to understand how the built environment and plants and different kind of management approaches alter urban heat on a really fine scale at the scale that people live and work and play.

Working with Sebastian on this project has been amazing. We've been able to bring the knowledge and expertise of smart city technologies at the Institute for Sustainable Futures together with his perspectives on heat in Western Sydney and I think that what we're producing here with SIMPaCT is really going to be of interest not just in Sydney but across the country.

Sebastian Pfautsch:

One of the sponsors of SIMPaCT is Sydney Water who came on board with a specific request that we can upscale and downscale the artificial intelligence module for any irrigation system. I’'m expecting that SIMPaCT will be taken into other environments where the complexity is lower so it's much easier for us to then start control irrigation systems using SIMPaCT.

This is a fantastic project because it's innovative, nobody has ever tried this before and with the team that is forming SIMPaCT, I'm very confident that we can actually deliver what we set out to do you.

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Environmental conditions across the park will be made visible in several forms. Park visitors can use their mobile phones to check where the coolest spot for a picnic is, or where they should exercise.

Sydney Olympic Park Authority will use this information to optimise their water management and detect technical problems in their irrigation system.