Polaron allows multiple concurrent users to participate in the simulation and planning process, however ultimately decisions have to be made. By tying in Polaron into live data streams and situational awareness tools – you can measure and augment those decisions and use machine intelligence to augment the tough process of making least worst option decisions – be that cost, the application of limited resources or augmenting perception in challenging or data poor environments.
Combatting uncertainty via modelling
The axiom that “all models are wrong but some are useful” is a truism of mapping and simulation across the field. However when it comes to decision making there is often a multitude of possible paths that can be followed as well as gaps in the data and situational awareness picture.
Beyond Rumsfeldian known unknowns
As a Data Science and Tech company – we know all too well that data is often imperfect, dirty, out-of-date and even misleading. One of the key components of Polaron is to address this and provide a simulation tool – driven by data – that can reveal and unlock intrinsic value and help to inform and justify decision making. For instance when we “unpack” the OSM database for the EU or the UK – there are errors in it, and due to its open relationships (e.g. In the UK we refer to Motorways and the majority of the world Highways) – there isn’t a semantic schema of the world. So we must process this, reconcile it (e.g. the width of the road, if approximated – or add in this data) as well as sanitize and clean the data – to make it usable and useful. The same is true of the simulation layers data – as lossless as is possible – else lossless and strict when required.
Decision making in Polaron:
Multiple solutions
We believe that simulation can augment human decision making and are focused on a human-in-the-loop approach to ensure the best of human and machine intelligence. In life there are often multiple solutions to a challenge – which is where simulation can bridge that gap of uncertainty and permit iterative testing – as well as factor in human inputs. A by product of this is to produce a living model of the challenge and options open to you, to reduce the number of different potential solutions and permit a testing and evaluation tool to verify the assumptions and impact of a given change or event. Some challenges may have one optimal solution – but many other solutions may have to be discarded on the way to get there. Polaron makes that process faster, cheaper and more effective.
For everything a cost
By allowing the cost of different proposals to be factored in (e.g. the cost per meter squared of a road repair) you can begin to evaluate multiple different dimensions of a problem. If for instance the cost of a quick fix is high – but the commercial impact is also high this can be presented in an interactive and easy to understand model; and even tied into other accounting and planning tools – permitting you to model in multiple dimensions and consider different options at the Starting up a project, mandate or project initiation stages – mitigating risks and reducing the possibility of costly changes to a project once in flight. A lot of simulation tools focus on a very specific focus – whereas inherent to the model – we can encode nearly any data type into our simulation and allow the relational spatial mapping systems to highlight problems and in time we even suggest solutions or alternatives.
Different scales & Perspectives
Urban Hawk has merged the 2D and 3D presentations – allowing a 3D building or site to be displayed inside of a city scale map. You can zoom into a station and see the passenger data, or switch back to the city scale model to see how that train or flow of people will then impact other services (such as buses or local businesses). This allows us to map not just individual buildings, but patterns of life and Polaron can ingest large statistical datasets at speed to allow you to model changes and monitor changes in expected behavior. By empowering these different views and perspectives to run within the same simulation we can provide situational awareness from the man on the ground to the 10,000ft perspective of a boardroom and beyond.
Logging & Versioning
Urban Hawk have had some engagements with the Insurance markets – to provide data and risk evaluation. A key part of this is to justify a decision to be able to show how that decision was made and the model used to produce it. To that end we have an intelligent means to permit versioning as well as retaining some of the common model data and permitting our clients to retain the data layers, models and maps they’ve created – allowing versioning, iteration and logging of decisions, updates and changes to be tracked and logged. This can be customized to your level of need and is designed to be robust and cheap to house – permitting interface with Historic Data, be that for Energy consumption, regulatory data and other information that must be / or is useful to retain. This approach also provides you with a data lake from which to apply machine learning and ai to gather more insight and refinement to the models.
Key Collaboration Capabilities
- Share & save plans Share & Save your work – allowing easy access to your simulations by the whole team.
- Create and log decisions Use simulations to drive decisions & document progress and performance.
- Works where you work Browser-based access for multiple users, you can work where you work (WFH!).
- Access management Provide access to different users, employees, clients & auditors.
- Real-time & Live Data Means making decisions faster, and getting quick responses and answers to your questions.
- Connect to external services Direct connect or Tunnel into external datastores & services via Web Tech & REST APIs
- Backup and Connect Backup data, justify past decisions and combine simulation into your projects & plans