The National Environment Agency (NEA) of Singapore has partnered
with Ecquaria Technologies Pte Ltd (Ecquaria) to develop a new Waste and
Resources Management System (WRMS), according a press
release from Ecquaria, dated 15 January 2018.
The new system is expected to facilitate waste minimisation
and resource sustainability by integrating all waste-related systems into an
ecosystem.
It aims to digitally transform
the way NEA collects data and manages: 1) public sector environment
sustainability initiatives; 2) toxic industrial waste; 3) renewable and
non-renewable resources; and 4) day-to-day waste disposal operations.
“Driving innovation and encouraging technology adoption” is
one of the key thrusts under the Environmental Services Industry Transformation
Map (ES ITM) launched
in December 2017.
In line with this, the WRMS will leverage NEA’s existing
Enterprise Architecture (EA) and the new Ecquaria
Government Platform Enterprise Edition (EGP EE) to enhance service
delivery.
New technologies, such as microservices and containers [1], will be adopted for business
agility and uninterrupted operations.
Under the microservices architecture, an application is
built as a collection of loosely coupled, small, modular services. Each
microservice can be deployed, updated and scaled independently.
Instead of updating the entire application, the
loosely-coupled microservices can be easily updated and deployed. This would
allow NEA to respond promptly to policy changes and constantly changing requirements.
The new WRMS will also enable the visualisation of the
health of each individual microservice using built-in monitoring tools.
Developers can easily manage resources, promptly pinpoint and rectify errors at
the individual microservice level. Together with the system resiliency provided
by the microservices architecture, WRMS will thus facilitate uninterrupted
operations.
The WRMS will also include features to facilitate the use of
data for NEA to make informed decisions and policies.
The WRMS will include a NEA Survey System (NSS), which would
support NEA Research and Statistics Department (RSD) in data collection by
conducting and managing surveys. The collected data will provide an analysis of
Singapore’s waste management, resource consumption and public sector
environment sustainability initiatives.
The entire survey process from planning, design and
creation, tracking of survey submissions to analysis and reporting will be automated
through NSS.
Other than the usual functions of a survey application, NSS
will utilise the configurable workflows available on Ecquaria’s platform to
manage the entire survey workflow such as administering access control
management and survey request approval.
During 2018, Ecquaria partnered the Prime Minister’s Office
(PMO) of Singapore to launch
a crowdsourcing portal, called eCitizen Ideas!
on Nectar – Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) developed by the Singapore government.
Previously, in 2015, Ecquaria also rolled
out a one-stop Weather Information Portal (WIP) that provides
real-time weather information by location, for the Meteorological Service
Singapore (MSS), an agency under NEA.
[1] Containers enable software to run reliably
regardless of the computing environment. A container image is a lightweight,
stand-alone, executable package of a piece of software that includes everything
needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, settings. Containers
isolate software from its surroundings, for example differences between
development and staging environments and help reduce conflicts between teams
running different software on the same infrastructure.
