Between the Poles

SPAR 2013: BIM + GIS based facilities management at Denver International Airport

At SPAR 2013 Dennis Rodriguez, Project Manager at Denver International Airport (DIA), and Daniel Stonecipher of Immersiv, gave a fascinating presentation on how they combined a BIM-based design and construction process with GIS  to create a facilities and operations management (FM/OM) solution for managing DIA's infrastructure.

DIA is a small city and managing its infrastructure involves many of the same probelms that utilities and municipal governments have to deal with.  As-builts are unreliable or not existent,  which meant that DIA really didn't know reliably where their assets were.   DIA has nine million CAD files which meant a major data management problem.  Their maintenance program  was dysfunctional because they didn't have the information they required to rationalize it with a data-driven process.  They had a lot of redundant data because of silos of information in different departments using different applications.  The most important impact of all of this was subjective decision making during the budget planning process, characterized by the so-called HiPPO (highest paid person's opinion) problem.

Their ultimate goal was data driven processes that supported predictive maintenance and objective metrics for decision making especially in prioritizing projects during the budgeting process.

The way they addressed this was by a combination of data normalization and business process rationalization.  The swiitched to an integrated building information management (BIM) design and construction process that produced a normalized data stream.  During design and construction the data that was required for facilities management and operations (FM/OM) was collected.  This involved collecting and validation existing data and developing continuous data and process management.  The result was FM/OM ready BIMs (both horizontal and vertical) and current relational data structures.

A critical aspect of their solution was that all data including BIM models was geolocated, which  made it possible to load all the data into a GIS linked to Maximo.  Geolocating all their facilities made it easy for them to organize maintenance work on different types of infrastructure concurrently, so that they could excavate once for multiple utilities rather than different crews reexcavating at the same location multiple times.

Dennis and Daniel said that a number of airports are interested in DIA's solution.  I would expect that universities, municipal governments,  and anyone who needs to manage infrastructure in a campus or municipal environment would find DIA's solution worthwhile investigating.

SPAR 2013: Integrated geospatially-enabled asset management at the Utah Department of Transportation

The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) is responsible for about $30 billion in assets including pavement, bridges, signs, culverts and signals.  At SPAR 2013  Stan Burns, Asset Management Director at UDOT gave an overview of a very ambitious program involving inventorying all assets and developing an integrated gespatially-enabled asset management  system. 

UDOT has about 6000 centre-line miles (10 000 km) of highways and has just completed an inventory of the entire system.  The inventory generatd a total of 30 terabytes of data, 6 terabytes of imagery and 24 terabytes of point cloud data captured by LiDAR.

UDOT is in the process of developing applications that are designed to provide a common interface for the dozen or so UDOT groups that provide a variety of services.  One of the most important features of the architecture of the integrated asset management solution that UDOT is developing is that location represents a fundamental way of indexing and integrating disparate data sources.  For example, it makes it possible to see critical maintenenance issues in different layers such as culverts, pavement, and bridges on a common landbase map, so that repairs can be coordinated for all of these assets at the same time. 

A critically important objective is no data duplication by implementing a data management stategy based on data stewardship,  In essence every piece of data has a single owner, which could be a group or department.

Interoperability is a critical issue because UDOT has many different software systems from different vendors including Oracle, Bentley, ESRI, Deighton, Mandli, Virtual Geomatics and others.

But perhaps the most important aspect of this project is the sharing of a common dataset among all the departments of the UDOT.  As Gene Roe of LiDAR News said in another session, sharing of data among different departments of DOTs is not the current situation in many DOTs.

This type of asset management represents a cultural shift for DOTs, because it makes it possible to maintain assets proactively, develop strategic directions, and create wisdom from the huge volume of asset and other data such as historical weather conditions.  For example, it makes it possible to predict future bridge and pavement conditions, so that funding requirements can be projected into the future.

SPAR 2013: Digital highways require integrated engineering and geospatial data

At SPAR 2013 I had the opportunity to hear very forward looking presentations by Ron Singh, Chief of Surveys/Geometronics Manager at the Oregon Department of Transportation.  What Ron sees in the future and what motivates a lot of what Don sees needs to change in the highway construction process is autonomous vehicles, which will provide a major motivation for what Ron refers to as digital highways.

Automation over the last 25 years

If you look at the last 25 years there has been quite a lot of automation in the form of survey automation such as electronic data collection, GPS, and basic 3D laser scanning;  design automation such as computer aided design and drafting, and a bit of construction automation.  The primary focus has been on speeding up the project development process, but the end goal remains  2D paper construction documents.  Some people have been using what is called 2..5 D, a 3D roadbed prism with 2D objects on it.  In Ron's view the current way of designing and building highways has reached the end of it's lifetime and a complete transformation to a new paradigm is required.  The way Ron refers to this is standing the current process on its head and I blogged about it yesterday.  Fundamentally it involves intelligent 3D models replacing the current as-builts and a process that speeds up project development because it leverages existing engineering data rather that requiring a complete resurvey at the beginning of every project..

A new paradigm for intelligent highways

The objective is intelligent highways that will support autonomous and partially autonomous vehicles.  The new paradigm needs to be data-centric and real-time.  It will involve automated construction.   From a data management perspective it will require highway infrastructure lifecycle management, which will involve a very different approach to the survey/design/construct/maintain process that is currently used for highway projects in North America.

First of all, it will involve geospatially enabled 3D digital data. A key requirement is a low distortion geospatial coordinate system that will provide the foundation for geolocatiig all infrastructure including utilities.  It will require interoperability using industry standards for data exchange. Most importantly it will support a construction process that uses post-construction surveys to replace as-built plans with a full 3D engineered model that supports GIS/engineering data integration. 

It will require geospatially-enabled enterprise data management including version control and the ability to search for things geospatially.  It will provide tools for geospatially enabled asset management.  It will provide a framework for developing and maintaining engineering and geospatial data including 3D engineered models as well as scanned data for existiing structures for the entire life cycle of a highway.

SPAR 2013: Turning the construction process on its head

At SPAR 2013 I had the opportunity to hear a very forward looking presentation by Ron Singh, Chief of Surveys/Geometronics Manager at the Oregon Department of Transportation.  It was even more impressive because Ron's background is surveying.  His primary objective is speeding up the project development process.

Ron first looked at the project development process that has been used in the transportaion over the past 25 years.  It starts off with a complete survey of the project terrain to create a basemap - existing as-builts are rarely consulted.  Design of the new project is then conducted based on the basemap produced by the surveyors.  The result is paper drawings which are used by construction contractors to build the project.  After construction is complete construction as-builts are submitted, but they are almost an afterthought.  They are often as-designed rather than as-constructed, and most importantly they are not "sealed", meaning nobody signs off on them putting their professional reputation behind their accuracy and reliability.  Practically what this means is that in the transporation industry, as-builts are treated as unreliable information.

What Ron Singh is proposing is to stand this process on its head by making the post-construction survey the critical source of reliable asset information in the form of a 3D intelligent model. 

Then when a new project is initiated 80-90% of the necessary information is already available in the as-built database making a complete resurvey unnecessary.  All that is required before design can begin is minimal due diligence to validate the as-builts. 

It also implies that there is a reliable asset database that is maintained thoughout the operations and maintenance phase of the lifecycle.

RICS BIM: Using COBie to extend the benefits of BIM to building operations and maintenance

Nick Nisbet, Director at AEC3 UK Ltd and buildingSMART, gave an overview of the role of COBie UK 2012 and its relationship to BIM.  In the UK BIM has been mandated for central government buiding construction projects in the UK starting in 2016.  COBie-UK-2012 defines the UK use of COBie 2.4, which was developed initially in the United States by the Army Corps of Engineers.  COBie-UK-2012 is intended for buildings, infrastructure and landscape; new, reburbished and existing structures; and for both small and large projects.  Unlike BIM it is not a legal requirement, but contractual.   Standard UK government construction contracts will have a built-in requirement for COBIe starting in 2016.

COBie, which stands for Construction and Operation information exchange, is a means of sharing structured information, especially with clients (customers).  It is simple enough to be represented as a  spreadsheet, but detailed enough for many client (customer) purposes.  It is not intended to be used as a way of sharing detailed design information among architects and engineers, however.  it was defined jointly by the buildingSMART Alliance and buildingSMART UK and is a subset of  Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard.

COBie is a standard way of classifying the spaces and components of a building.   In general a COBie facility is comprised of zones, floors/sectors, types (of equipment), and systems.  For equipment, it includes such information as replacement cost, expected life, warranty details, manufacturer and and model.  It also includes impact information which includes cost; energy, water and other resources requirements; emissions, pollution and other environmental impacts.  The COBIe specification even includes options for coordinates (location) and connections.  The latter allows connectivtity or associations between pieces of equipment to be recorded.  To facilitate maintenance COBie includes fields for summary instructions for use of equipment, contact information (email addresses and telephone numbers), and issue tracking.  Since the classifications are standardized, they enable comparison of different buildings to enable better building practices to be indentified and benefits quantified.

COBIe and BIM

COBie is designed to be used at all stages of the design, build, and operate and maintain lifecycle, but is especially useful at the handover stage, on completion of construction when the building is handed over to the client, and the operate and maintain (O&M) stage of the building's lifecycle begins.

When a building is comissioned and the client takes over responsibility from the architects, engineers,and contractors who designed and built the structure, the people responsible for operating and maintaining the building require information about the building; its facilities, spaces, HVAC, plumbing, fire and systems, and its equipment in order to be able to operate and maintain it.  Compiling this information has been a challenge and COBIe is intended as a vehicle for conveying structured information about the facility and its equpment captured during the design and build stages to the client as part of the handover.  Since BIM models will be mandatory for all buildings from 2016 on, the idea is that all of the data relevant to O&M would be collected in the BIM model(s) during the design and build stage.   COBie is seen as a way of conveying the structured data stored in BIM model(s) to the computerized facilities management (CAFM) systems used for operating and maintaining the building and is intended to provide all the information that is required by facilities management (FM) for operate and maintain the building. 

Automation

Furthermore the process of creating COBie data is designed tobe automated.  COBie data is intended to be machine generated and machine checked.

RICS BIM: Extending benefits of BIM to building operations and maintenance

At the RICS BIM National Conference 2013, Deborah Rowland, Head of Facilities Management, Government Property Unit, Cabinet Office in the UK Government outlined the Government's motivation and plans for a program to improve the post construction handover and operation of newly constructed buildings.  The motivation is clear.   Clients (meaning Government departments in this case) are not getting the assets and outcomes they expected.  Buildings are being designed and built that are found to be not fit for purpose by end users including being expensive both from a cost and carbon perspective to operate and maintain.

When it is realized that the cost of maintaining and operating a building over 20 years can be up to 30 times the original construction cost, it is clear that there are potentially very large long term benefits from such a program.  The effort put in up front on a project can have enormous leverage on the outcomes achieved. 

Government Soft Landings Policy

The Government Soft Landings (GSL) program is intended to rectify this and is designed to put in place a legal, contractual, and technical framework (based on the BSRIA Soft Landings Framework) including incorporating building information modeling (BIM) to fix the problem by ensuring continuity thoughout the buiiding lifecycle from inception, though design, construction, comissioning, training and handover through to operations and maintenance 1-3 years after handover.  Facilities management (FM) contracts are often for one year only so the 3 year horizon is designed to provide focus for the initial program implelentation.  Ms Rowland said that  in the future the intent is to extend it to the entire building lifecycle.

The Government Soft Landings Policy was agreed to by Government Construction Board in September, 2012 and will be mandated for all new central government buildings and large reburbishments (renovations) in 2016 in alignment with the BIM Level 2 mandate for design and construction of new buildings.

The guiding principle is that GSL will be a key element of the design and construction process.  It will require early engagement of the end user and the inclusion of a GSL champion during design and construction.  It also requires post occupancy evaluation and feedback to the design and construction team, and a concomitant commitment to post construction involvement from the design and construction team.  This process will require contractual agreements between the design/construction and FM teams.

GSL powered by BIM: The role of BIM in the GSL process

BIM is expected to facilitate the collaborative working of the design and construction and FM teams throughout the project.  The 3D BIM model will enable the FM team to experience the buildings from an operate and maintain perspective before the building is constructed to ensure that projected operational costs are maintained and the impact of changes on operations are assessed.  For example, in the case of the Ministry of Justice's Cookham Wood facility, the FM team was able to experience the building during the pre-construction phase and identify changes that would make maintenance easier and operations more efficient.

The  model is also expected to provide a fully populated asset data set for the CAFM (computer aided facilities management) systems and to reduce time wasted in obtaining information about assets including the cost of maintaining or replacing equipment.

The 3D model is also expected to faciliate planning modifications to building use and assessing their impact on operations.  After 10-15 years, typically, the building will require major renovations, and the traditional approach of inviting land surveyors to resurvey and remeasure is reconized to be inefficient.  A better process is envisaged in which an up-to-date BIM model maintained as part of ongoing operations and maintenance provides a basis for planning and designing renovations.

GSL Champion

A key role required by the GSL is the GSL Champion, who is envisaged as being critical to ensuring that a project meets client needs.  This is not seen as an additional cost or contractual role in the project, becaue the skills required already exist, typically within the real estate/facilities management group.  The GSL Champion's role is to act as a proactive voice for end users including faciltiies management.  The GSL Champion ensures that the appropriate metrics are in place to measure the quality of the facility from the perspective of the end user.  A critical responsibility of the the GSL Champion and one of reasons he/she needs to be involved during design and construction is to ensure that all of the data is incorporated into the BIM model to fully populate the asset register in the CAFM system.  The GSL Champion is also responsible for ensuring that the post occupancy evaluation and monitoring is undertaken.

Next steps for GSL

A BIM4FM industry group has just been setup, and its initial task will be to identify what FM needs in the BIM model it receives from design and construction.  Another important area of focus will be data standards for mapping COBie onto CAFM data models.  There are plans for developing procedures for BIM models for renovations for existing buildings and it is intended to extend the process to other infrastructure in addition to buildings (GSL for infrastructure).

Geodesign Summit: Changing how we manage our built environment

David Bartlett, who leads IBM's Smarter Planet initiative, believes there is an " immediate requirement to significantly and urgently change the way our built environment is managed."  And he is very sanquine about the capacity of our evolving technology to do this.  The Internet of Things is approaching a trillion objects.   Moore's law conrtinues to operate so we have incredible processing power.  The cloud is enablng us to make this processing power available to just about anybody with any type of device any where. Big data technology is enablng analytics in real-time.  We are rapidly approaching havng enough computing capacity to capture digitally, visualize and model our entire built environment.  IBM's Smarter Planet initiative is aimed at helping to make this happen.  According to David 42% of the world's energy goes to buildings so improving the efficiency of buildings is a primary focus of the Smarter Planet intiiative.

In October 2009 President Obama signed a directive calling for a more sustainable operations  strategy across the federal government. Commercial buildings use roughly 40 percent of the energy in the United States and the federal government owns approximately 182 million square feet of office space nationwide.  The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has a goal of reducing energy usage across federal buildings at least 30 % by 2015.                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
The GSA has contracted IBM to create a cloud-based centralized system that will monitor building performance and feed information into a central building management dashboard. It is expected that better analytics will help the government automate building controls to help property managers take more active control over building performance.

The initial focus during the first year of the smart building initiative will be 50 buildings (including the White House) that have already been identified as energy inefficient. It is estimated that the project could save approximately $15 million in operational costs annually.

Where do we start ?

A frequent question that David often gets after an organization buys into the smarter planet vision is where do we start.  IBM has developed a capability maturity model that offers a roadmap for organizations to use to assess their current situation to determine at what stage they are and then provides guidance to what they should prioritize to get to the next stage.

Motivating change

One of the most important tools in motivating change is transparency.  The internet faciliates transparency.  President Obama's administration has made government transparency using the internet a top priority.  David has found that transparency and gamification is extremely powerful in motivating change and in overcoming institutionalized inefficiencies ("but we have always done it this way").

Crowdsourcing green at the Los Angeles Unified School District

IBM has found that educational institutions and defense departments are the most receptive to the Smarter Planet vision. 

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is an interesting example.  LAUSD, which is the second largest school district in the country, decided it wanted to be the nation's greenest school district..  LAUSD has 700,000 students and more than 14,000 buildings spread out over 710 square miles.  But they had no budget for doing the green initative.  What they did have was an IBM asset management system and a lot of students with mobile phones.

Students, teachers and staff became part of the solution.  A mobile app developed by an IBM partenr was installed on students and others' mobile phones that made them all green monitors and reporters identifying maintenance issues such as leaky faucets and broken air conditioning units by sending text messages and photos through their mobile phones. The mobile app sends the photos and texts for analysis to the server where a GIS shows staff where the problem is located and records the problem in the asset management system.  Gamification was used to encourage compeitition, for example, for who is the best green reporter.  Within the first eight months of implementing the program LAUSD responded to more than 750 maintenance requests. Things are getting fixed and students and others feel like active participants in the program to make the schools greener. 

IBM plans to announce the next three school districts to participate in the Smarter Planet program.

Why are utilities implementing analytics programs and how are they doing it ?

At  the Data Analytics for Utilities conference in Toronto yesterday, several speakers explained what is driving utilities to invest in analytics programs, and gave some real world examples of how utilities are implementing analytics programs.

Why analytics ?

In a nutshell, as a number of speakers emphasized, the goal is to enable utilities to make decisions based on information derived from the increasing volume of reliable data that is available to utilities as a result of their smart grid activities, rather than "gut" intuition, which is what utilities had to rely on in the past because they had limited and out-of-date data.

Lloyd Tokerud of Hudson Energy referenced a seminal paper, an MIT Sloan Management Review "Big Data, Analytics, and the Path from Insight to Value" that found that top performing organizations are twice as likely to apply analytics to activities. 

The study also found that the biggest challenges in adopting analytics are managerial and cultural.  Lloyd pointed out that to enable an analytics prorgam to be successful, it is necessary to educate people on the use of data and to promote a data-driven culture rather than intuition.  The important benefit is that an anlytics program can enable the utility to make better decisions faster.

Lloyd also said that analytics requires people with different skills than traditional IT.   He called them  "purple people".  Purple people understand both IT (red) and the business (blue).

Guidelines for implementing an analytics program

Mary Rich, who was responsible for smart grid and analytics initiatives at Centerpoint Energy in Texas gave a very insightful overview of how Centerpoint implemented their first anaytics program subsequent to their rollout of smart meters and AMI.

Based on her experience at Centrepoint she made several points that are important for any utility planning to embark on an analytics program, 

First of all, implementing an analytics initiaive is not a departmental exercise, it has to be company-wide.  It needs top-level support and strong governance.  Without these it will either fail or drag on for years.  Seondly it is not cheap.  It requires new tools and new people.  The big payback will not be short term, but long term.  Creating a data-driven culture is a cultural transformation that requires breaking down traditional data silos in engineering, operations, GIS, and across the company. 

One of the most important objectives is ensuring that the data is accurate and comprehensive.  Most importantly there can be only one authoritative source for each piece of data.  Conflicting reports are not going to help management make decisions rapidly and even worse they will raise red flags with the regulator.

How did Centerpoint Energy implement an analytics program

At Centerpoint they created a team comprised of subject matter experts (SMEs) from all divisions of the company.  It was ensured that these people were relieved of some of their normal committments so they could devote quality time to the analytics initiative.

The team spent about a month and a half identifying areas which potentially could benefit significantly from the application of analytics.  They then winnowed these down to the top 25.

For each of these opportunities they wrote detailed use cases,  Mary emphasized that this was not easy.  It was time-consuming and often required external support people to help SMEs who were not familiar with writing use cases.

As a practical example of implementing a use case, ons of the uses cases related to what Centerpoint refers to as "diversion" and what others call non-revenue-generating, non-technical losses.  With analog meters Centerpoint had to rely on the meter readers to note signs of tamperring with a meter and to report a possible diversion problem to Centerpoint.  A crew would roll a truck and investigate,but in many cases it would turn out not to be a diversion probem.  Wth smart meters meter tampering can be detected auomatically., but it is an involved process because it is necessary to make sure that there isn't an outage or a crew working in the area, because these can trigger events that look like meter tampering.  The SME team working on the use case estimated that by using autmated techniques they could increase detection by 20%.

The reality was quite different. They found that their autmated algorithms were much more effective than expected, because they were able to identify real diversion events with 80% accuracy.  They found that the big business benefit was fewer truck rolls.  Mary strongly recommended that every utility should know the cost of a truck roll because reducing truck rolls is one of the most important areas where utiltiies can reduce costs, often dramatically.  Mary said that in Houston alone, they were able to eliminate 4.5 million truck rolls.

Big data and trends in data analytics for utilities

I had the opportunity to catch up on current trends in analytics in the utility indusrty at  the Data Analytics for Utilities conference in Toronto today.

Jane Allen and Tom Peters from Deloitte gave a high level overview of what utilities are experiencing as they move toward the smart grid and decarbonizing energy generation through intermittent renewable energy sources.  

Big data

The smart grid means intelligent devices that can report their status sometimes as frequently as many times per second.  Smart meters, which are many utilties' first experience with intelligent devices, typically capture electricity usage in 15 minute intervals, which for a utility wih a million meters translates into 3.2 terabytes of data. They may be required by law or by the regulator to maintain historical usage data on-line for a significant period of time.  The result is that the data volumes that utilities need to manage are going up exponentially.  For example, Oncor, the largest distribution and transmission utility in Texas said that their operational database which used to be 30 terabytes is now 300 terabytes.

Analytics

To make sense of the huge volumes of data that utilities are collecting requires specialized analytical tools that are able to handle large data volumes.  The first wave of analytical tools were not designed to do this in real time or even near real-time, but the next wave will be able to.

Apparently Germany was the first country to use analytics to help sculpt electric power demand to the supply of intermittent energy from wind and solar.  This is critical in Germnay because renewables contribute a greater proportion of the electric power in Germany than any other major country.

Deloitte sees five main areas where analytics are being applied in the utility industry, customer, supply chain, financial, workforce and risk. 

Tom Peters oulined some of the trending application areas where analytics are being used by utilities. 

Pricing analytics

Segmenting demand using demographcs and looking at dynamic pricing to manage peak demand (demand response) in different sectors.

Marketing anlaytics

Monitoring the response to web-based marketing campaigns in real time.

Customer service analytics

Analyzing unstructured text data in social media looking for "bags of words" that identify topics in on-line discussions to monitor and assess how the on-line community is responding to utility programs and initiaitves.

Workplace injury analytics

Using analytics to identify high-cost work-related injuries that are preventable.

Fraud analytics

For example, analyzing a company's general ledger for an entire year looking for duplicate invoices, invoices sent to the wrong company, billings for products and services never delivered, and so on.  Tom Peters said that in the case of one large company this saved $11 million in a year.

Geospatial analytics

Using location information to look at big data in a different way from a traditional spreadsheet makes it possible to see things from a much more interesting and enlightening perspective.

In summary utilities are having to deal with a lot more data.  They need analytics to winnow the wheat from the chaff, to turn huge volumes of data into actionable information.  The good news is that the software analytical tools available now that are designed specifically for big data are getting better and more affordable.

Reusing BIM models for operations and maintenance

The adoption of building information models (BIM) has provided quantifiable business benefits by helping improve collaboration and reduce the risk of budget and schedule overruns during the design and construction phase of building projects.  Many (including myself) see the potential for even greater benefits of BIM modeling to owners during the operations and maintenance phase of a building. 

As a first step Autodesk Labs is hosting a free technology technology preview of the Maximo® Integration for Autodesk® Revit® 2013 products that helps extend the value of BIM models into the operations phase of the building lifecycle. Attributed data about building assets, developed during the building design and construction phases, can be published directly into Maximo during commissioning or at building "handover," thus supporting more immediate and efficient asset management once the building is occupied. The asset data can also be exported in the COBie data specification. In addition, the BIM/3D asset data can be viewed inside Maximo, in context with Maximo applications and processes.