Objectives of the service
The objective of ConsTrack is to provide reliable and timely information on construction activities across Europe and to produce indicators for accurate business cycle analysis having an immediate impact on stock and credit markets.
Therefore, market specific and highly integrative components are delivered by ConsTrack, driven both by specialised back-frontend IT system for information input, storage and dissemination:
- The ConsTrack Monitor LIGHT service provides continuously updated information on new construction site developments (e.g. location, area, type of construction) per country on European scale on a monthly basis. It does so through highly innovative, fully automatic, big data processing of the Sentinel-2 data streams, covering entire Europe on a weekly basis.
- The ConsTrack Report system provides a GPS/GLONASS (soon Galileo) based mobile APP and backend IT system for information input, storage and dissemination to enable regional and commercial banks to monitor and report in a standardized way individual building construction and renovation activities. Thus, even more detailed insight (e.g. type of investor, number of restoration sites, total within chosen period, total km² etc.) are provided.
- The ConsTrack Monitor FULL service integrates the ConsTrack Monitor LIGHT and ConsTrack Report information for each object in order to be able to provide a synoptic, more detailed information service about the construction and/or renovation activities on a country level. Merging the ConsTrack Monitor & Report service provides the basis for serving a new econometric forecast product (beyond ConsTrack) for evaluating the impact of policies and serve as baseline for new regulation scenarios.
Users and their needs
A prominent and well distributed group of major banks are users of the ConsTrack services and committed their involvement, including
- the European Central Bank (ECB), representing the European end-users side of the value chain,
- the Austrian National Bank (OeNB), representing the national end-users side of the value chain, and
- the regional and commercial banks (Tiroler Sparkasse as part of ERSTE Group, Hypo Steiermark (Styria) and Hypo Oberösterreich (Upper Austria) as part of HYPO Leasing and Raiffeisen-Landesbank Steiermark), representing the regional level of end-users side of the value chain.
EU-19, EU-28 in a later stage.
Service/ system concept
The overall ConsTrack system consists of the following components:
- The EO based construction site detection big data processing system, delivering the ConsTrack Monitor LIGHT data products
- The GPS/GLONASS based mobile APP and a ConsTrack Report IT system hosted at local bank servers, providing the ConsTrack Report information service.
- The ConsTrack central data management system facilitating data communication, integration and access, disseminating the envisaged ConsTrack Monitor FULL information service to the customers.
Credits: GeoVille
Space Added Value
The space assets used in the project are Earth observation and satellite navigation (GPS/GLONASS).
The use of satellite technologies for continuously delivering and inventorying quantitative economic information on the status of the European construction activities provides a completely new solution. Earth observation enables acquiring information on land surface changes with high accuracy and frequent revisit time, thus delivering coherent, reliable information at a good cost-benefit ratio. New generation satellite observation capacities enable a continuous information stream, while conventional methods to assess construction statistics are timely and temporally limited.
Integrating satellite navigation linked information derived via a smartphone APP in addition serves the kind of European wide but detailed information relevant for many kinds of application requirements of the financial and related sectors.
Current Status
Following a successful Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) at the end of September 2017 (perfectly on-time with respect to the original project schedule), from mid-October the ConsTrack consortium performed the deployment of the ConsTrack system in the three pilot-demonstration banks. The On-Site Acceptance Test (SAT) review took place in Innsbruck at December 7th and marked the completion of these activities, while now the ConsTrack consortium is working to make the system fully operational for the pilot-demonstration stage in the upcoming month.
