Between the Poles

Infrastructure excellence competition

Infrastructure-excellence.com is hosting the second annual competition showcasing Excellence in Infrastructure— highlighting the best projects done in 2012/2013. The winners will be given over US$10,000 in prizes by the competition sponsors.  The competition is open to anyone 21 years and older who is planning, designing, building, and managing infrastructure projects.  Project types may include the following:

• Transportation (roads and highways, rail, airports, or bridges)
• Land development (commercial sites, subdivisions, public parks, or recreation)
• Water (distribution, water resources, dams and levees, or wastewater)
• Energy (electric and gas distribution, electric transmission, and substation design)
• Urban planning

Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location-enabled Society

On Thursday and Friday of this week the Centre for Spatial Law and Policy is co-hosting a conference with Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA), Berkman Center of Internet and Society and Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The conference, titled "Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location-enabled Society" will be live-streamed and combines leaders from many of the diverse aspects of the geospatial community (many of whom are members of the Centre) with internationally-recognized academics and researchers from Harvard and other top universities.

If you have some time on Thursday and Friday  you can watch/listen to the conference over the web.  Details will be posted here.

SPAR 2013: Developing an intelligent 3D model of above and below ground infrastructure for the City of Las Vegas

At SPAR 2013 Keith Warren, BIM/3D SUE Manager at VTN Consulting gave a fascinating presentation on the 3D above and below ground model of city infrastructure including roads, utilities, telecom, and buildings that VTN has developed with the City of Las Vegas.  Keith believes that at the present time Las Vegas' 3D city infrastructure model is unique in North America.

This model also represents a classic example of the benefits of convergence, the integration of engineering design data including building information models (BIM), geospatial data including digital terrain models, high resolution photogrammetry, and point clouds derived from laser scanning, together with 3D visualization technology.

Education

About five years ago the City of Las Vegas approached VTN because they saw some potential value in 3D modeling.  At that time the city had had little experience with 3D modeling.  VTN has a broad range of in-house capabilities spannng engineering (traffic, public works, and 3D subsurface utility engineering), survey including laser scanning, GIS, building information modeling, and visualization.  Over the next two years VTN focused on education, working with the city and other utility agencies to introduce them to 3D modeling and visualization technology.  VTN organized workshops with the city, local utiltiies including the water district, and other public agencies to educate them in some of the capabilities of the new technology.  At the same time they worked with the city and other public agencies to understand the problems they were facing.

Challenge: subsurface utility engineering (SUE)

One of the problems that was identified repeatedly in these workshops, not only at the City but also at the utilities, was hitting underground infrastructure during excavations.  According to national statistics, in the United States an underground utility line is hit on average every 60 seconds.  The total cost to the national economy is estimated to be in the billions of dollars.  The problems is that in most municipalities in North America, for years underground utility lines have been put in the ground not according to plan but wherever it has been easiest and cheapest to build them.  In addition 2D as-builts of underground infrastructure are unreliable.  The result is that in most municipalities the location of underground utiltiies is very poorly known.  This was the situation in Las Vegas.

Since the city had been educated on 3D modeling technology by VTN, they decided that this technology could provide a solution for the problem of locating underground utilities.  The City decided to go ahead with a project to model one and half miles of Main Street in the older part of Las Vegas.  The project was intended to model below and above ground facilities including roadways, utilities and telecommunications, and buildings.

The project also specified implementation of a new low distortion geospatial coordinate system to make it possible to support engineering grade accuracy for geolocating infrastructure.

Reality capture

Buildings were modeled in several ways, including extruding a building footprint from a GIS, using building models from the Sketchup 3D Warehouse, laser scanning existing structures, and complete BIM models for newer buildings provided by architects. 

A variety of techniques were used for reality capture of underground utilities and other infrastucture includng GIS, survey, design records, test holes, and ground penetrating radar (GPR).  Above ground utilities were captured by combining GIS data with mobile laser scanning. 

In the future to improve data quality for underground infrastructure, since the City owns most of the right of ways within Las Vegas proper (some is owned by the Nevada DOT), it has mandated that in the future contractors are required to use open trenching for utiities and all work has to be surveyed before the trench is closed. 

Intelligent city infrastructure model

The deliverable was a set of 3D models of all the underground and aboveground infrastructure and buildings for the one and a half mile corridor of Main Street in old Las Vegas.   Engineering design and other data was combined with the City's geoimagery, digital terrain models and other GIS data. The models were designed to run with the software that Las Vegas already had including Civil 3D, Navisworks, ESRI ArcGIS and Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler (Infraworks).

Augmented reality

Working with a partner VTN developed an application for the iPad that allowed underground facilities to be viewed virtually under the actual roadway.

Map-21 and Every Day Counts

Map-21 and Every Day Counts are Federal Highway Authority (FHWA) initiatives that are designed to encourage the adoption of 3D modeling.  MAP-21 (Moving ahead for progress in the 21st Century) requires 3D modeling and virtual construction and visualization technology for all eligible projects.  The Federal government will provide matching funding on projects using intelligent 3D modeling and visualization of up to 5% fo project costs.  The Map-21 initiative was announced last July, but it turns out that what Las Vegas has done is in Keith's estimation 80-90% compliant with Map-21 guidelines.

Every Day Counts is another FHWA initiative that encourages 3D modeling.  According to the FHWA 3D modeling in transportation construction allows for faster, more accurate and more efficient planning and construction. The FHWA foresees that as the benefits are more widely recognized, many in the U.S. highway industry will transition to 3D modeling over the traditional two-dimensional (2D) design process.

Benefits of the intelligent 3D city infrastructure model

One of the major benefits that Las Vegas has experienced as a result of developing the intelligent 3D city infrastructure model is increased safety because of the reduced risk of unexpectedly hitting underground utilities especially hazardous ones like gas mains. 

The benefits of being able to accurately locate existing underground infrastructure are immense.  They include automated clash detection to identify potential problems when plannng, designing and constructing new undergound infrastructure.  Also there are reduced operating costs because of reduced truck rolls for cable/pipe locate operations. 

Overall the City has found that the 3D model approach provides more information per dollar invested, in other words more capabilities at lower cost.

Europe's Digital Agenda review: EUROGI recommends geospatial including BIM, open data/services and an EU property service

In 2010 the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) was the first thematic strategy launched under the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.  The European Commission launched the Europe 2020 Strategy with a vision to achieve high levels of employment, a low carbon economy, productivity and social cohesion.  The Digital Agenda for Europe is one of the seven flagship initiatives of the Europe 2020 Strategy.

The Digital Agenda is the European Commission's strategy for using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to the benefit Europe's society and economy for the period 2010-2015.  The Digital Agenda is linked to various other EU policies, such as the single market, consumer protection, research and innovation, industrial policy, regional and rural development, environmental sustainability, skills and culture, or healthcare. It is expected to contribute to major challenges such as climate change and the aging population.

In 2010 the Digital Agenda for Europe was the first thematic strategy launched under the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.  In 2011 the Digital Agenda Scoreboard reported on the first year of implementation of actions as well as on progress on performance targets.

As of 1st July 2012, the DAE is being managed by the European Commission Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT).

EUROGI's submission to the DAE mid-term review

Given what we know about the contribution of geospatial technology to GDP from Australia and New Zealand, it is surprising that the DAE does not directly reference geospatial data and technology.  And given the importance of sustainability in the goals of the DAE and the recent EC prioritization of energy efficiency, it is also surprising that it does not mention the integration of building information modeling (BIM) and geospatial.  In response to the geospatial gap EUROGI, which is the umbrella organization for European geospatial organizations, has offered recommendations as part of the mid-term review of the DAE currently taking place.

EUROGI's recommendations are

Open geospatial data and services

Identify types of public sector generated geospatial data which should be made available within a range of access models, from no cost and no restrictions on usage to those requiring payment and with access restrictions.  Across Europe barriers to the use of the data still constitute constraints. INSPIRE and the PSI Directives aim to remove these barriers,  but further measures are needed.

Geolocating digital public sector information

Geotagging the huge volume of digital data, such as text documents, spreadsheets, pictures, videos, remote sensed data, and tweets, that is produced daily by state bodies at all levels would contribute to transparency about public policy, implementation, monitoring and review.

Building information modelling and geospatial information/services

Produce an outline of how best to promote building information modelling (BIM) and its full and seamless integration with geospatial data and services.  One of the most important technology advances transforming the EU construction and building industry is BIM.  Sustainability programs like BREEAM and  LEED require natural lighting, solar radiation, wind, renewable energy, and noise analyses all of which require integration of geospatial information with the building design information which is contained in BIM models.  BIM also enables greater understanding and transparency between public client stakeholders and citizens.

Integrated property information service

Develop an outline for a comprehensive European property information service.  Trillions of Euros are invested in property across Europe and yet there is no overall integrated multi-lingual property information service which facilitates seamless tracking of trends based on location, identifies financial flows, provides property details, explores the impact of natural hazards (eg flooding, landslides etc) and other factors. It could be argued that the presence of such a service may have contributed at least to some extent to predicting the disastrous property market collapses which have taken place in certain European countries.

European location strategy

A strategy for location is required to unlock the potential of location information for supporting the objectives set out in Europe 2020 such as job creation, social inclusion and environmental and development sustainability.

Realizing the potential of spatial data infrastructures

Establish a program to support sub-national and focused thematic Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) and set out minimum and desirable specifications to facilitate interoperability between these SDIs through open APIs.

Geospatial sector in a global context

Identify ways in which European geospatial companies can better compete in the global geospatial information and services market place.  The INSPIRE initiative is recognized throughout the world as a global leader in the SDI field and yet the increasing and deepening experience in harmonization processes across different cultures and languages is not fully being exploited internationally.

Developing the geospatial skills/knowledge base

The Commission should develop a strategy for supporting the expansion and deepening of geospatial skills.  Employment in the geospatial sector is expanding at a rate which exceeds overall economic growth levels but skills shortages remain.  This creates an opportunity in memeber states with high rates of unemployment.

Emerging trends and new opportunities

Support a process of regular reviews of emerging technology trends such as Internet of Things,
remote sensing, cloud computing, open data initiatives, seamless indoor/outdoor positioning, and social media which will impact the geospatial sector in order to identify opportunities for the EU ICT sector and the public sector.

Autodesk releases Infrastructure Modeler 360 for the cloud

Autodesk has released a new service as part of Autodesk 360, called Autodesk BIM 360.  One of the new tools in BIM 360 is a Conceptual Design and Feasibility Evaluation service, which enables users of Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler to publish, store, and manage large models in the cloud. Users can invite other team members to access, download, and edit shared models.  If you ever used Project Galileo Online, this may look familiar.  Users can invite other team members to access, download, and edit shared models.

Introductory videos are available.

This part of Autodesk BIM 360 is a cloud-based collaboration service available to subscription customers.

Technical University of Berlin wins Oracle Spatial Excellence Award for CityGML

Last week I blogged about an extension to the OGC CityGML standard for utilities.  Today at the Oracle Spatial User Conference the Institut für Geodäsie und Geoinformationstechnik - Technische Universität Berlin, where Thomas Kolbe and his team are responsible for the CityGML specificiation, won an Oracle Spatial Excellence Award for Education and Research.

Berlin 3D City Model

I blogged about the 3D city model of Berlin before.  The 3D City Database is a free 3D geo database to store, represent, and manage virtual 3D city models on top of a standard spatial relational database.  The schema of the 3D City Database is based on the City Geography Markup Language (CityGML), an OGC standard for representing 3D city models.  The 3D City Database was developed for the Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Wirtschaft, Technologie und Frauen and the Berlin Partner GmbH.   The 3D City Database has been implemented as an Oracle Spatial relational database schema. It is shipped as a collection of SQL scripts which allow for creating and dropping instances of the 3D City Database on top of an Oracle Spatial DBMS.  The 3D City Database is open source and released under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3 (LGPL).

Geospatial World Forum: Unlocking quality asset information at Heathrow

Airports are like cities.  They have all the infrastructure that cities have plus some.  Heathrow is the busiest airport in Europe with on average 181,000 passengers passing through it each day.  Heathrow has 13 different types of infrastructure, some of which are unique to the airport environment.  To provide some idea of the magnitude of the infrastructure at Heathrow, there are more than 45 000 man holes, 72 miles of high pressure fire water mains, 81 miles of aviation fuel pipelines, and power cables carry voltages ranging from 9V up to 400 kV.

That is a lot of infrastructure to manage.  The challenge is made more difficult because it is an environment where even a minor accident carries the risk of serious consequences.  (At last year's Autodesk University, Shashi Verma gave a talk about asset management at Heathrow called Flying High: Multi-Utility and Infrastructure Project Implementation at Heathrow Airport.)

At the Geospatial World Forum, Nigel Stroud, Geometry Information Manager with the British Airports Authority (BAA) at Heathrow gave a fascinating talk about the Heathrow Map Live system which provides web-based access to high quality information about Heathrow's infrastructure.  The primary reason that access to quality information is important is for safety reasons, but there are also legal and contractual requirements, such as CDM (Construction Design Management) regulations. And there is an important efficiency dimension to this as well.

Single point of truth

To enable interoperability and open access to various types of data, Heathow has defined a Common Data Environment (CDE), the objective of which is basically a single point of truth.  The objective of CDE is to cultivate a culture where data is created once only and used many times.  Another way to put this is that each data element has a single owner and is shared across the organization.  Implementing this is much more difficult than it sounds.  In many organizations, different groups independently capture and maintain  information about the same assets.  For example, in a study of a single utility Gartner found that nine different groups were independently capturing and maintaining similar data about power poles. At Heathrow CDE means that standards,  guidelines, and work processes are designed to support a single point of truth.  The important business benefit from a cost perspective is that having a common data environment minimizes rework, increases re-use of designs and provides for efficient handover from design and construction to operations.

Data quality

Because safety is Heathrow's first concern, data quality is a top priority. Reliable data about infrastructure is required to respond effectively to an emergency as well as to provide information about the location of existing infrastructure to the more than a thousand contractors working at Heathrow at any given time.  In 2002 40% of Heathrow's underground facilities were mapped to within half a meter. Now 72% of the underground facilities are mapped to half a meter. 

In my view, the most important thing that Heathrow has done is designing business processes to optimize data quality.  For example, contractors at Heathrow are contractually obligated to progressively deliver as-builts over the lifetime of construction projects.  In other words, as-builts are not only required at the end of the project, but during the progress of construction, so that they can reviewed by BAA as work proceeds.

Heathrow has had an effective asset management system for capturing and maintaining information about infrastructure including infrastructure and building models, drawings, operations and maintenance reference manuals, and asset maintenance reports for many years, but has found it a challenge to provide access to this information across the business.  This is what the Heathrow Map Live system accomplishes, a single, simple web-based tool based on an Oracle database that allows everyone within the business to query, retrieve and view information about Heathrow's infrastructure.

Avoiding underground infrastructure during excavation

One of the major hazards of all construction activity is inadvertently hitting underground infrastructure.  To give some idea of how frequent this occurs, in the US in 2010 there were 112,917 incidents where underground utility facilities were hit during excavation.

At an airport this is particularly hazardous because not only are there gas mains and electricity distribution cables, but also aviation fuel lines and very high voltage power lines.   This is one of the biggest benefits of the Heathrow Map LIve system.  At Heathrow statistics show that the proportion of events where underground facilities were hit during excavation as a result of inaccurate information decreased by a factor of 6x from 2002 to 2011, primarily as a result of access to high quality information including location about underground infrastructure provided by Heathrow Map Live.

Geospatial World Forum: Dutch 3D standard integrates CityGML/GeoBIM and large scale geography

At the Geospatial World Forum in Amsterdam, Jantien Stoter of the Delft Univeristy of Technology and an advisor to Geonovum, gave an overview of the ongoing work on the Dutch 3D standard, which is being piloted by about 100 organizations in the Netherlands.  Geonovum is the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) executive committee in the Netherlands. Its goal is to provide better access to geo-information in the public sector and is responisble for developing and maintaining the standards for geospatial information that are necessary to achieve this goal.

The Dutch 3D standard integrates CityGML and the Dutch IMGeo standard. 

• CityGML is an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard for 3D information (geometry and semantics) about cities, external to buildings. GeoBIM is a CityGML Application Domain Extension (ADE) intended to extend CityGML to include detailed, semantic information about the inside of buildings.  GeoBIM was initiated in 2009. The last official update was completed in 2010.
• IMGeo is the Dutch standard for the exchange of large scale geography such as roads, tunnels, water bodies, land use, and so on.  IMGeo is intended to be a scale-independent object model providing a uniform nationwide coverage.  IMGeo 2.0 contains a mandatory part, the Basisregistratie Grootschalige Topografie (BGT). which has legal status in the Netherlands, plus additonal data. IMGeo is 2D, but is extensible to 2.5D and ultimately to 3D.  Like CityGML, IMGeo recognizes levels of detail (LOD).

There are six work groups involved in the Dutch 3D standard effort. For example, one is responsible for compiling killer applications using the 3D standard.

Relationship to IFC

One of the work groups could have broad implications, potentially beyond the borders of the Netherlands, This work group is responsible for aligning the CityGML ADE GeoBIM standard and the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) BIM standard maintained by BuildingSmart.  IFC is intended to enable the exchange of BIM data between applications developed by different software vendors in a vendor-neutral way.  The objective of the work group is to define a standard, semantically meaningful mapping between IFC and GeoBIM.

Integrated infrastructure management and urban planning at the City of Vancouver

 

Directions Magazine is hosting a webinar about how the City of Vancouver has implemented an integrated solution  focusing on urban planning and infrastructure management.  Jonathan Mark, Senior Manager GIS and CADD Services and Dan Campbell, Graphics Planner, will discuss their implementation and the use cases that drove it. The City of Vancouver uses both Autodesk and Pitney Bowes Software applications extensively, creating the 2D to 3D work flow.  To date, Autodesk products have been used primarily for the design and maintenance of infrastructure, 3D modeling and visualization and web mapping, while Pitney Bowes Software’s MapInfo Professional has been used for analysis on urban planning projects. With the announcement of the strategic partnership between Autodesk and Pitney Bowes Software, the City is expecting to be better able to integrate these workflows and share information.

Ahmed Abukhater, Pitney Bowes Software Director of Global Product Management, will be joined by Justin Lokitz, Autodesk Senior Product Manager, to explain how the partnership of Autodesk and Pitney Bowes Software will benefit GIS practitioners and designers everywhere, but especially those within municipal government, transportation and natural resources. With a combined solution from both organizations GIS and BIM users are empowered to effectively realize more unified infrastructure lifecycles, from Plan -> Design-> Build-> Manage.

More specifically, the webinar will present
•    Details of the City of Vancouver’s integrated GIS workflow
•    Applications for urban planning, transportation and natural resource management
•    Benefits of full end-to-end workflow solutions

Who should attend
GIS practitioners and managers in any industry, and especially those in government, transportation and natural resource management.

When
Thursday, May 3rd
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT

You can register here

AU: Modeling cities in 2.5D at the City of Vancouver

Dan Campbell is an urban planner at the City of Vancouver.  I've seen and heard several of Dan's presentation over the past few years in Singapore, Bellevue, and other places and I always look forward to them, because they always have an intriguing slant while being practical at the same time.

This year at Autodesk University, Dan makes the case that for a city, while 3D would be nice, in practice there are advantages in using an approximation that Dan calls 2.5D.  

Vancouver has 170,493 buildings.  As a rough calculation Dan assumed that if he spent something on the order of 20 minutes modeling each building, which seems a pretty low estimate, he would need 29 years to model Vancouver in 3D, and that doesn't include all the infrastructure outside of the buildings.  This is tongue in cheek, of course, but  Dan's point is that we need a faster way to create a city model using existing 2D data.

In traditional 3D modeling, source data such as architectural drawings, photographs, point clouds, and GIS data are used to create the model. For the most part, once the model is completed, the source data is discarded leaving only the very complex 3D model geometry.  And the modeling skills that are required to create the model are significant.  

The difference in working with 2.5D data is all the attributes required to create the model can stay with the model. This means there is 3D geometry, but the model has intelligence as well.  With the 2.5D approach the model geometry will be much simpler than that generated through full 3D modeling. 2D building footprints are extruded using building heights or number of floors to form a simple geometry.   Not only is the model simple to create and visualize, but the modeling skills required are much less.

Not Seeing the Forest For the Trees

To properly address all the issues facing cities, it is important to be able to see the big picture. Because of software and hardware limitations, this hasn’t really been possible until recently.  From Dan's perspective, Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler has allowed the City, for the first time, to work at the full extents of the City of Vancouver. Although the model is visually less rich at this scale, it is a more than acceptable trade-off for all the other benefits. As well, visual fidelity is not always necessary, and being able to view data in a more abstract manner can be more appropriate for certain tasks.  In other words, a full 3D model is often pretty, but not very useful because the trees get in the way of the forest, whereas a 2.5D approximation might be plain, but it makes it easier for the urban planner to use the model to get useful results about the forest.