Addressing aging of the infrastructure facilities that form the foundation of industry and of people’s lives, and coping with increasingly frequent torrential rains and other natural disasters, have become priority issues in infrastructure development in Japan. Japan also faces social issues that include a shrinking pool of people able to shoulder infrastructure development, caused by a declining birthrate and aging population. Achieving safe, secure, and prosperous lives for people calls for a shift from conventional infrastructure development and for accelerated innovation in digital technologies that utilize the Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and big data, as well as aggressive advancement of infrastructure facility development, maintenance, and operation.

To further expand the framework for technological development and meet such needs, we reorganized the EJ Research Center for Disaster Risk Mitigation and launched the EJ Innovation Technology Center on June 1, 2021.

Three groups operating under the basic principle of “a leading infrastructure solution consultancy firm in Japan,” a goal of the EJ Group, will collaborate at the EJ Innovation Technology Center to carry forward the efforts of the EJ Research Center for Disaster Risk Mitigation. These groups will tackle the development of differentiation technologies that leverage the IoT, AI, and other digital technologies, along with the evolution and development of infrastructure technologies overall, including the latest inspection and surveying technologies.