Between the Poles

Platform for CAD/BIM/GIS Integration: the Atkins SDI

One of the most interesting presentations from a design and construction perspective was by Neil Gyte, Atkins Global, one of the world's leading engineering and design consultancies, who talked about Atkins Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), which is designed to provide a foundation for CAD/GIS/BIM integration and for which they won an AGI Innovation Award in 2008. Atkins' long term objective is to use the Atkins SDI to enable carbon critical design in a digital city context.

Map Middle East 2009 Abu Dhabi: Geospatial for Design and Construction

I've been to several Map MIddle East conferences previously in Dubai and had always found many of the presentations worthwhile.  There are always good speakers including invariably Vanessa Lawrence of the Ordnance Survey, who was here this year as well.

But this year was quite a refreshing change.  First of all the conference was held in Abu Dhabi, instead of Dubai.  Abu Dhabi, while pretty much a construction site, though not quite at the frenetic pace of Dubai, is quite an attractive spot, especially the corniche, which runs for kilometers and is being turned into a green park extending along the water front.  Secondly, the conference included a symposium dedicated to  Geospatial for Design and Construction, which was moderated by Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the the Open Geospatial Consortium.   The symposium included fifteen speakers, including Eng. Nazek Al Sabbagh, Managing Director, TRAKHEES, whose opening remarks "that the slowest to change are the people who will benefit most" set the stage for a discussion of a diverse set of topics all related to geospatial and the design and construction industry. 

Oivind Rooth, Deputy Director General, National Office for Building Technology and Administration, who talked about using web services to provide access to relevant geospatial data required for building permit submissions.  Their long term objective, which I expect to be widely emulated around the world is to integrate BIM and GIS based on the buildingSMART standards so that architects, and engineers and costruction firms will be able to make submissions which will include BIM models in electronic form.  This will contribute to the ability of city governments to create and maintain current and reliable models of their built environments.

Mario Seneviratne, of Green Technologies, Dubai, discussed LEED certification in general, but included a discussion of the first LEED certified buildings outside of North America, and the first in the Middle East.

One of the most interesting presentations from a design and construction perspective was by Neil Gyte, Atkins Global, one of the world's leading engineering and design consultancies, who talked about Atkins Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), which is designed to provide a foundation for CAD/GIS/BIM integration.  Their long term objective is enable carbon critical design in the context of a digital city.

 

What is this, palm tree or ?

I've been at Map Middle East in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.  Right outside my hotel on the Abu Dhabi corniche, I really didn't pay attention to what looks like a rather tall palm tree, until I looked at it a little more closely.  It probably wouldn't fit in so well with the landscape in Canada in the snow in winter, but here it is perfect.

Smart-grid: Running the Power Grid like an Airplane Rather than a Railway

At the recent GITA conference I heard a presentation by Steven Collier of Milsoft on the smart-grid. He illutstrated the distinction between the grid as we know it and the smart-grid by drawing an analogy between the grid and mass transit networks.

Our current power grid

What is amazing about the power grid is that, unless it is used to pump water to reservoirs like at Niagara, the power grid is designed to provide just-in-time delivery.  The large batteries that are required to store electricity are too expensive, so electricity has to be used exactly when it is generated. In this light the power grid is an amazing engineering achievement, because it balances demand and generation.  

The grid is 99.97% reliable according to DoE (The Smart-Grid, An Introduction, Department of Energy), but it is not nearly as reliable as the telephone network.  Outages and interruptions cost Americans at least $150 billion annually.

In the US there are 9,200 electric generating units with more than 1,000,000 megawatts of generating capacity, but most of them were built in the 1960s or earlier.  There are over 12 000 sub-stations in the US, and the average age of a substation transformer is over 40 years, beyond their expected life span. There are more than 300,000 miles of transmission lines in the US and since 1982, peak demand for electricity has exceeded transmission growth by almost 25% every year. but incredibly since 2000 only 668 miles of new interstate transmission lines have been built.  Also incredibly, the power industry spends less on research and development than most other industries, so power technology really hasn't changed much from Tesla's day.  Many people believe that the reliability of the grid is decreasing while our dependence on it is increasing, so that the risks associated with the current grid require us to invest in a new, smarter grid.

Smart-grid

A smart-grid is a much more complicated animal than our current grid.  It involves price signals to consumers, distributed generation, automated load management, a new bidirectional communications network, storage, redundancy, and self-healing.   And this is where I think Steven Collier captured the essence of it.  We have to run the grid like an airplane, rather than like a railway.  An airplane is an automated feedback loop.  If a gust starts to raise a wing on one side, the navigation system automatically counteracts by adjusting the ailerons.  With the current grid the only way a power company knows there is an outage is when a customer  calls.  You can imagine what flyng would be like if the pilot had to wait for passengers to complain before adjusting the ailerons and righting the airplane.  With a smart grid, outages would be automatically detected, isolated, and power restored to most if not all users by automated reconfiguration of the network, all within minutes, rather than hours as now.

Intelligent Metering (Smart-meters) to Cover 80% of EU Population by 2020

Last week the European Union (EU) Parliament passed legislation which includes measures to enable the deployment of smart meters for 80% of the EU population.

The main objective of the legislation is to create a single, competitive, open EU market for gas and electricity. This includes creating an EU Agency for the cooperation of National Energy Regulators, which sounds similar to National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) in the US,  promoting an even playing field by separating generation, transmission, and distribution, and promoting sustainability by enabling small companies to have guaranteed access to the energy market.

GITA Emergency Response: Panel on Federal Geospatial Technology Sharing

One of the really amazing sessions at GITA this year was an  emergency response panel on geospatial technology sharing among agencies in the federal government.  Organized by Talbot Brooks of Delta State University The panel included representatives from the most important agencies with geospatial technology responsibility including

• Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
• National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA)
• US Geological Survey (USGS) 
• Department of Defense (DoD) - Office of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs

The discussion presented individual and coordinated efforts  that are taking place between the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs, Department of Homeland Security Infrastructure Information Collection Division, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency Office of Americas and the U.S. Geological Survey National Geospatial Program Office to improve infrastructure information collection, the Homeland Security Infrastructure Programs, sharing and protection for the Homeland Security, Homeland Defense and Emergency Preparedness, Response and Recovery communities.  

This is the first time I have seen all of these agencies in the same room talking about geospatial technology sharing.  Major congratulations are due to Talbot Brooks for enabling this to happen.

More Details for $4 Billion ARRA Stimulus for Smart-Grid

The Obama Administration has announced plans for more than $3.3 billion in development grants for smart-grid technology and $615 million for smart-grid storage. Also announced were new guidelines for the ARRA smart-grid grants.  The grants are restricted to $500,000 to $20 million for smart-grid applications and $100,000 to $5 million for grid monitoring devices.

New Federal CTO Is an IT Innovator

President Obama has appointed Aneesh Chopra as federal CTO and Jeffrey Zients as chief performance officer (CPO).  CTO and CPO are new positions created by the Obama administration. 

Annesh Chopra has been Virginia's Secretary of Technology. There's a fascinating Youtube clip of Chopra on IT infrastructure, interoperability and 20^th century governance.  "We have all this data. We just can't mine it because it's siloed." The Federal CTO will be an assistant to the President, as well as the Associate Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He will be working closely with Vivek Kundra, the new Federal CIO, and the new CPO to develop and implement President Obama's technology agenda.

Vivek Kundra was the CTO for the District of Columbia.  There's a very interesting Youtube clip of Vivek Kundra discussing interoperability and geospatial.

The IT industry appears to be pretty happy about these appointments.  All three appear to be IT innovators so this could be an exciting time for technology.  Tim O'Reilly is extremely positive, "Aneesh Chopra is a rock star. He's a brilliant, thoughtful change-maker. He knows technology, he knows government, and he knows how to put the two together to solve real problems. We couldn't do better."  

Autodesk Announces Topobase 2010

Autodesk has announced the release of Autodesk Topobase 2010, which extends AutoCAD to support geospatial infrastructure management in addition to design. Topobase includes water, wastewater, gas and electric data models and applications as well as a framework for developing new vertical applications.  One of the unique features of Topobase is that it allows you to deploy both desktop AutoCAD and MapGuide-based web clients.

GITA 2009 Keynote: The Stimulus (ARRA) and the 2009 Scorecard on American Infrastructure

Blaine Leonard, of the Utah Department of Transportation and the President-elect of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), gave the opening keynote at GITA 2009 today.  His talk focussed on the 2009 ASCE Scorecard on American infrastructure and what the stimulus means for addressing some of the infrastructure challenges that the ASCE has successfully attracted public attention to.

Mr. Leonard presented a breakdown of the part of the ARRA spend that the ASCE believes is going to infrastructure, something over $70 billion, and then discussed the short fall for several of the items.

The key takeway I left with is that the stimulus is making a significant dent, but by itself it is insufficient to resolve the problem.  Of the $2.2 trillion the ASCE estimates is required to bring American infrastructure up to an acceptable level, meaning B- or C+, the money currently allocated by all levels of government is about 45% of what is necessary.