Between the Poles

SPAR 2013: Integrated geospatial, LiDAR and design datasets for large infrastructure construction projects

Kevin Gilson, of the Project Visualization group at Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB), gave an overview of how PB manages 3D+ datasets in support of design and construction for large infrastructure projects such as the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the I-95 New Haven Harbour Crossing /Q-Bridge reconstrcution, and the Alaskan Way viaduct project.  He showed how the project visualization team leverages geospatial data, LiDAR data, design data and construction planning data together in large integrated datasets that concurrently support visualization, stakeholder communication, design, construction planning and site logistics.

PB has more than 30 staff dedicated to project visualization.  That included folks who do 3D modeling, design visualization, web design, and programming.  3D technologies include building information modeling (BIM), 3D design, virtual desgin and construction (VDC) and laser scanning (LiDAR).

3D modeling for design and construction

Some of the reasons that designers and construction firms are adopting 3D technology are the serious limitations of 2D sheet sets, still legally required fro s-builting but very unreliable, the design efficiencies of 3D parametric models, and the limitations of siloed project data.  PB has adopted the concept of project information models or PIMs, that integrate information about all aspects of the design and build process and that potentially can flow data through for operations and maintenance.

3D modeling and model-based design are used by PB for design validation, clash detection, and parameteric modeling, civil integration management, 4D modeling (time+3D), 5D (cost+time+3D), and design visualization.  Model-based design involves integrating CAD, GIS, survey, analytics, BIM and associated databases, and 3D visualization typically in a vitual gaming environment.

Construction firms in particular see tremendous advantages in 4D models that integrate design and gespatial data and allow the construction team to virtually build the project so that they can check staging and construction sequencing and site logistics virtually.  5D and higher dimensions allow them to add additional metrics including cost, resources, materials, and equipment.

The benefits that PB realize by this integrated approach based on 3D+ dataest include finding and fixing conflicts between different design groups (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, structural, and so on) during the design phase rather than during construction when clashes are much more expensive to fix.  Another benefit is being able to quantify things using analytics, so  that decisions are data-driven rather than subjective.

A major benefit is less re-work is required reducing the risk of cost and schedule overruns.  A big advantage is improved communication and coordination between all project stakeholders, and especially with non-technical decision makers.  Being able to see photorealistic visualizations of what the project is going to look like makes a huge difference in communicating with politicians and the public.  PB uses gaming technology making it possible to experience a project before a shovel has gone into the ground.  For example, on highway projects, PB's visualization makes it possible to drive the highway and even the detours required during construction in a virtual environment so that the public can experience the changes and be prepared for them before they actually happen.

Another important benefit that Kevin sees from a project approach that includes visualization is that "sexy deliverables" get peoples attention, within the project team as well as with external stakeholders.  Several other speakers at SPAR 2013 also emphasized the importance of the "sexiness" factor.

Laser scanning in construction

Kevin described a number of applications of laser scanning (LiDAR) as part of the 3D constrcution process.  A major application of LiDAR is contruction monitoring, capturing construction progress as well as being able to automate the process of checking for divergence from design when contractors for a variety of reasons don't build what is designed. 

Another important Laser scanning application is accurate and reliable as-builts.  At SPAR 2013, speaker after speaker in different sectors of the construction industry reiterated that current 2D as-builts, still legally required, are unreliable and rarely looked at by anyone post-construction.  Marco Vidali Castillo at ICA which is responsible for the Autopista Urbana Sur project in Mexico City  gave an example of how trying to use 2D as-builts can lead to problems necessitating major re-engineering.  LiDAR scans of a completed project can provide the reliability that 2D as-built sheet sets lack.  On the Autopista Urbana Sur project Marco says that ICA intends to deliver LiDAR scans as well as the legally required 2D as-built sheet sets.

3D modeling and sustainability

There are also benefits from the perspective of sustainability to PBs project approach. Collaboration typically has relied on the exchange of paper documents which on a large project can involve many thousands of paper documents.  Collaborating in a virtual environment can dramatically reduce paper flow while improving the quality of communication.  It can also improve traffic flow and resource management during construction, thereby reducing emissions. A life-cycle approach to data management during design and construction, with data being reused for operations and maintenenace can reduce rework resulting in significant efficiencies.  

Selecting software tools

The PB project visualization team takes a best of breed approach in selecting software for 3D modeling and visualization. An important criterion in selecting tools is interoperability between the different technologies.  Currently the software stack that PB relies on includes

Geospatial

• ESRI
• Global Mapper
• Infraworks (Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler)

CADD

• Microstation InRoads
• AutoCAD/Civil 3D
• Solidworks

Visualization

• 3ds Max
• Sketchup
• Realtime - UDK, Unity

Collaboration/4D

• Navisworks

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.

Moving from 2D design to 3D design standards in electricity distribution

The Utilities Standards Forum (USF) is an organization representing about 50 Ontario electricity distribution companies.  Its goal is collaboratively to define standards for its members to reduce duplication of effort.  

The USF has developed design standards for electricity distribution that meet the requirements of Ontario Regulation 22/04 under the Electricity Act of 1998.  Currently these are in the form of paper or PDF documents containing 2D isometric views of the components used in electricity distribution such as insulators, clamps, surge arrestors, fuse-cutouts, terminations, cross arms, cable guards, and other types of equipment.

There is pressure to move to 3D design standards.  There are several motivations for this.  In this time of the challenge of an aging workforce in the utility industry, increasing the efficiency of engineers and designers is an important motivator.  But another equally important one is the increasing number of younger designers and engineers that have been brought up in  3D digital world and want to work in a modern 3D environment.

At the EDIST 2013 Conference in Toronto an overview of the new 3D design standards was presented by Ron Lapier and Lori Gallauger of the USF.  The new 3D standard is a major step forward in two ways.  First of all the components required for electricity distribution design are now 3D so that electricity distribution design can be performed in a 3D environment.  But equally important USF intends to make them available digitally in the form of a library of DWG files containing 3D objects that can be brought into a 3D CAD environment and integrated with other components to create a completely 3D representation of an  electricity distribution design.  The design can be viewed and manipulated in 3D.  As well 2D drawings for construction can be generated from the 3d model.  The components have real world coordinates so that clearances and dimensions can be directly measured from the 3D model.

Accessing Bing maps in an AutoCAD environment

Project Basejump is a free technology preview that enables AutoCAD Map 3D/Civil 3D users to access Bing web mapping service (WMS) maps including aerial imagery, road, traffic, and other information.  Project Basejump is a FDO provider that enables you to bring Bing Maps layers into an AutoCAD environment as a base map.  Project Basejump was first made available in May 2012.

GITA PNW: A cloud-based hosted solution for small utilities

At the 12th annual Geospatial Information and Technology (GITA) Pacific Northwest Conference at Salishan on the Oregon Coast, John Mitchell of Terraspatial Technologies gave a fascinating presentation on a hosted or SaaS (software as a service) solution for small utilities.

I blogged previously about Burlington Hydro, a relatively small utility in southern Ontario that is integrating into an intelligent network many aspects of what is typically included in smart grid including intelligent netwrok devices, self healing networks, smart meters, distributed generation, electric vehicles (EV) , factory ride-through systems (enables factories to continue functioning through outages), battery-based electric storage, bidirectional communications network linking the intelligent devices to the control center, and dramatically increased volumes of real-time data.

Most utilities, large and small, are experiencing or very soon will experience a similar change in the customer services, responsivness, and level of reliability their electric power networks are expected to provide. 

An important difference between large utilities and small utiltiies, many of which are municipally-owned or rural coops, is that large utilities have the IT staff and experience to deal with intelligent electric power networks whereas small utilities often don't. 

Hosted solution

What struck me as as so unique about what Terraspatial is offering and so valuable to small utilities is that it is a hosted solution, in other words, all the utility needs to install at their site is a browser, everything else is running in the cloud.  The most important benefit of a hosted solution like this is that it reduces the level of IT capacity that the utility needs to maintain in house.

One of the utility associations that Terraspatial has been working with is the Central Services Association (CSA), an association of 116 smaller utilities, in central Mississippi.  Jointly Terraspatial and CSA have developed the requirements for a hosted solution called PlantWorx for electric power utilities.  Based on thes requirements, Terraspatial has designed and built, and CSA has been testing a solution called PlantWorx.

The design goals of the solution that CSA and Terraspatial have developed are very relevant to small utilities. 

• It is hosted, which means that the utility does not need to own or manage servers or software. 
• It is secure because it relies on the security of Rackspace a major cloud hosting provider that can provide a level of security, including protection from internal tampering, role-based access by users, protection from external  threats, the latest encryption, redundancy and back-ups, ISO certified data centers, and mirrored servers for persistent backup, in other words a much higher level of security than the average utility network is capable of.
• Because it it running in the cloud, it is accessible from anywhere and from any device, in the office and in the field.
• It is an integrated work order management sytem solution supports staking through to accounting and reporting.  It interfaces to customer information systems, accounting and billing systems, and materials management systems,
• It provides a dashboard allowing the utility to monitor key performance indicators of the utility's business.

Migrating to AutoCAD Map 3D 2013 from 2010 and 2011

Autodesk has made available an AutoCAD Map 3D 2013 Profile Migration Hotfix that will help you migrate settings from Map 3D 2010 or Map 3D 2011.

Augmented reality technology preview

There is a new technology preview at Autodesk Labs, Augmented Reality for Showcase.  Augmented reality makes it possible to overlay information (graphics, text, video, sound) on to a live video feed of the real-world in real-time.  Based on Autodesk Showcase, which is an application that produces photorealistic high quality interactive 3D real-time rendering of design models, the Augmented Reality plug-in makes it possible to visualize models in the real-world as viewed through your web or video camera.

The process to overlay a design model on the real world as seen through your video camera is pretty simple.   You prepare your model in Showcase and then associate a supplied marker (jpg file) with your virtual object.  You print the marker and place it in the real world and point your web camera at the printed marker.  Then Showcase replaces the marker in your video recording with the model you've created in Showcase.  The technology preview will be available until October 31, 2012.  There is a video on Youtube that gives you an introduction to the augmented reality preview.

San Bruno explosion inquiry points to flawed GIS information

Flawed information flows affect safety

One of the major challenges facing the world's utilities is one of data management, optimizng information flows that involve multiple divisions within a utility. I have blogged about this challenge on multiple occasions (here, here, here and here).  This process needs to be optimized otherwise the quality of the information ("records") about the utility's overhead and underground infrastructure, where it is located and its maintenance history, is impaired, potentially leading to serious accidents like the gas explosions in Belgium in 2004 and the San Bruno explosion in 2010.

The basic process for designing, building and operating and maintaining a utilities network is essentially the same the world over and involves a cumbersome, inefficient, paper-based process.  Designers or planners create the initial design, called a construction drawing. Construction crews, often comprised of sub-contractors, build the facilities using paper construction drawings.  During construction, the drawing may be marked up or redlined to reflect changes in the original design.  After construction is completed, the construction drawing, now referred to as an "as-built", is forwarded to the records department.  The records department typically redrafts the paper as-built into the permanent records database, which is maintained as the company's record of its network infrastructure.

For work relating to connecting or disconnecting customers to the network, adding new services, repairing or replacing network facilities, and call-before-you-dig requests the records department is responsible for preparing maps showing the location of the utility's network facilities to assist field staff.  

The symptoms associated with a flawed process for managing records are as-built backlogs stretching from months to years, resulting in out-of-date data, and poor communication between the field and records staff, resulting in inaccurate data about network facilities in the records data base .  Inaccurate and out-of-date records not only reduce the productivity of field staff, but impact the safety of utility workers and the public, the primary concern of all gas and electric utilities.

San Bruno explosion

In the San Francisco Chronicle it was reported that "Federal investigators had determined that a major factor in the San Bruno explosion was PG&E's ignorance that its pipe had a seam running down the length of the line, which ruptured at an incomplete weld in San Bruno on Sept. 9, 2010.  Such a seam would have been noted on an accurate geographic information system report, and if it had, PG&E would have been legally obligated to prove it was in good condition."

Yesterday a utility company engineer testified that he "repeatedly told his bosses the company was relying on flawed data to vouch for the safety of its gas transmission lines before the San Bruno disaster, but that the utility took no steps to fix the problem."  He said that gas-system managers had ignored his and other employees' concerns that the company was relying on incomplete and inaccurate records contained in its geographic information system.

Optimizing information flow problem

The important conclusion here is that installing a GIS does not solve the fundamental problem, which is an information flow problem.  The most critical business process improvement is ensuring a digital information flow, pre-posting digital CAD designs directly into the records database, rather than redrafting the information from paper as-builts.  The second most important process improvement is proving a direct wireless link for field staff enabling them to participate directly in ensuring the quality of the records database. 

Heathrow Airport is an example where there is a lot of underground infrastructure, and it is an environment where even a minor accident carries the risk of serious consequences.  Heathrow has developed work processes around a data management system which ensures web-based access to high quality information about Heathrow's infrastructure.  At Heathrow standards, guidelines, and work processes are designed to ensure reliable data.  The most critical business benefit is safety.  Other benefits of Heathrow's apporach are that it minimizes rework, increases re-use of designs and provides for efficient handover for engineering designs from design to construction to operations. 

The direct benefits of business process improvement are eliminating the as-built backlog, with the important benefit that the records database is uptodate, and accurate data, because the entire field staff is participating in maintaining data quality.  Reliable data reduces the risk of accidents like Sana Bruno.  It also improves efficiency and productivity.  As utilities move to the new world of smart grid, or intelligent networks, reliable data about the network has become even more essential.

Burlington Hydro's real-time smart grid for operations and analytics: Managing big data real-time

At the Oracle Spatial User Conference in Washington DC this week, Don Guatto, COO and VP Engineering at Burlington Hydro and Geoff Cameron, EVP Intelligent Networks at AGSI gave a rivteing presentation on Burlington Hydro's (BHI) smart grid implementaton for the utility's GridSmartCity initiatives.

BHI is a utility near Toronto with 65000 meters, 32 substations and 93 employees.  The GridSmartCity initiatives include

• self healing networks - this initiative has reduced average outage times in BHI's service area to 20 seconds per year
• smart meters - Burlington is in Ontario which has deployed smart meters and time-of-use pricing province wide
• distributed generation - Ontario has a Feed-in-Tariff program which has led to the deployment of over 7000 micro-generation projects, mostly solar
• electric vehicle (EV) charging stations
• factory ride-through systems - enabling factories to continue functioning through outages
• battery-based electric storage

Smart grid management system for operations and analytics

An independent consultant hired by BHI made a recommendation with far reaching implications for BHI. "Two of the main factors affecting GIS today are the move towards using internet technology to be able  to serve GIS data to a much broader user base and efforts by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to promote interoperability.  BHI needs to implement a new GIS that will fit its technology vision and provide the benefits of today's GIS to BHI operations."

Based on this recommendation BHI determined that the foundation for their smart grid management system would be an open architecture based on open standards.  This would allow them to integrate their SCADA system, 65 000 smart meters reporting power use every 15 minutes, the supporting automated meter infrastructure (AMI), intelligent devices, power line sensors, a customer information system (CIS), their ERP system, engineering analysis, and other systems.  It would utilize bidirectional communications to both receive information from and control smart devices. The system would have handle much larger data volumes than BHI had ever experienced before.  For example, some devices were reporting 60 times per second.  And perhaps the most challenging requirement is that it also had to operate real-time, which as Geoff emphasized, is beyond the capability of today's traditional enterprise GIS systems.

Implementation

AGSI's solution uses their Go360 products which provide a scalable, geospatially-enabled solution built on an open service oriented web architecture. It uses Oracle Spatial for a shared, geospatia data repository and AutoCAD Map 3D for design and geospatial data maintenance.  A web browser, either on the desktop or on a mobile device, is all that's required to access tools for asset maintenance, cable locate, asset managemet, operations, financials and drill downs, automating network pinning and work protection tagging, SCADA, schematic views, automated CAIDI, SAIDI and SAIFI reporting, an outage management system (OMS), mobile workforce automation, automated as-built management, real-time asset monitoring and analytics, and an executive dashboard.

One of the most impressive Go360 applications that Geoff demonstrated was a transformer status monitoring dashboard that not only showed a map with transformer loading in real- in the form of a heat map, but could also report on historical loading and even estimate, based on the history of oveloading on a particuler transformer, how much the lifetime of the transformer had been shortened as a result of the overloading.  It also allowed the operator to reconfigure the grid in real time to reduce the load on overlloaded transformers and redistribute it to others with available capacity.

What impressed me most was to see how an open IT architecture based on open standards together with industry standard off-the-shelf components, a bidirectional communications network and real-time smart devices and sensors has enabled BHI to develop a state of the art real-time geospatially-enabled smart grid operations and management system that integrates with their existing enterprise systems and provides a common point of access to all their operational data. 

BHI has plans to contnue to develop smart grud applications in the future, but I think that they have built a strong IT foundation for their future smart grid development.

Autodesk University 2012: Call for proposals

The Call for Proposals for Autodesk University 2012 in Las Vegas closes on May 22nd.

Note: The 5/22 deadline is for submissions for AU in Las Vegas.  Submissions for AU Virtual 2012 will open in late June.