2022 SAG Award Winners

National Parks Board

Project Goal

In response to COVID-19, the Singapore Government has announced measures which includes closure or reduction in capacity of retail, entertainment venues and tourist attractions. This consequently led to sharp increases in visitorship to over 400 parks & gardens as more residents turn to green spaces to exercise, relax or for recreation.

NParks had to step up patrolling to monitor parks & gardens, and engagement of park visitors to reduce over-crowding of hotspots to ensure adherence of safe distancing measures. Staff had to be deployed for these duties during peak periods, e.g. weekends. This was labour intensive and unsustainable as these duties are over and above staff’s work in greenery & park management.

NParks saw a need for timely assessment of park visitorship and sharing of such information with the public to reduce overcrowding at hotspots in its parks. It acted swiftly to adapt from ESRI suite of ops tech tools to deploy a system to address this challenge.
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Business Problem Solved

Taking an agile and fit-for-purpose operations tech systems approach, coupled with an adaptive management mindset, are key to implementing and sustaining innovation. NParks built on ongoing digitalisation efforts, leveraging existing systems and platforms to develop a suite of tools to quickly respond to challenges faced during the pandemic. We took a modular approach to developing and deploying technology solutions, which enabled us to quickly rollout various operational tools, such as Safe Distance @ Parks portal which was put up in 3.5 days. To complement the portal, various technologies such as drones, surveillance cameras, robots and video analytics were utilised and integrated, enabling officers to get a better sense of visitor density in specific areas for more targeted safe distancing efforts. This helped to relieve manpower demands for safe distancing efforts at more than 500 green spaces in Singapore, and for more efficient resource allocation in park and greenery management.

Technology Implemented

Esri ArcGIS suite of products used for implementation of Safe Distance @ Parks include:
• ArcGIS for Portal to host the Maps
• ArcGIS for Server is used to publish the map data on the public website
• ArcGIS GeoEvent Server to pull the Carpark occupancy
• ArcGIS Dashboards to show CCTV images and locations
• ArcGIS Desktop to manage the locations in GeoDatabase and configure Trend Analysis
• ArcGIS for FieldMaps (Native app for Android and iOS) to manage the locations and attributes from the fields.

The near real-time park visitorship assessment system comprises:
• CCTV people and vehicle count algorithm by GovTech, Singapore
• Drone people count algorithm by Garuda Robotics
• Integration of all above using ArcGIS Portal APIs

Development Team Biography

System Owner – National Parks Board, Singapore
ICT Consultant – Government Technology Agency of Singapore, Singapore
System Integrator – ESRI Singapore