Between the Poles

Industry outlook in the process, power and marine (energy) sector

At the HxGN conference in Las Vegas this morning, a very intriguing perspective on the process, power and marine (PP&M) industry (weighted toeward energy) outlook was presented by Gerhard Sallinger, President of Intergraph Process Power & Marine, which is part of Hexagon at the HxGN conference this morning.

Industry outlook

• First of all project sizes are getting bigger in the energy sector.  Gerhard mentioned an Alberta oil plant project seven years ago that cost $6-7 billion which was considered large at the time.  Currently bidding is underway for a $60 billion LNG terminal in Mozambique.
• What this means is that modular prefabrication will be increasingly used, indeed required, for projects of this size.  One of the advantages of modular prefab is that it reduces the number of workers on-site.
• Gerhard is expecting that energy demand will increase by a 1/3 by 2030.  He expects the total capex for energy-related infrastructure to exceed $1 trillion.  What he is seeing from Intergraph's customers is that gas is booming, green continues to grow, and nuclear is coming back - projects are actually being built, not just planned, in Turkey, the US, China, and other countries.
• Shipbuilding continues to be depressed, but offshore (oil platforms) is growing.
• He sees shale gas on the rise, and went so far as to predict that it will shake up the industry.  For one thing, it is cheaper than offshore oil (or oil sands I would add from a Canadian perspective).  But from a software vender's persepctive shale gas plants are simple compared to other forms of energy and his team is looking into what the implications of this are for plant design software.

From a vender perspective, which can be one measure of the health of an industry and the directions it is headed, PP&M has been seeing solid revenue growth, in fact Q1 2013 was their best quarter ever according to Gerhard.  About one third share of the PP&M revenue came from the Americas, one third from EMEA, and one third from Asia.  Gerhard singled out Asia is having the greatest growth potential, calling if highly dynamic.

Convergence of geospatial and building information modeling (BIM) accelerates

About a decade ago Dave Sonnen, Global Analyst for Spatial Information at IDC, projected that the locationaware market for geospatial services would exceed the traditional GIS market in 2005/2006. The release of Google Earth in June 2005 transformed the geospatial services ecosystem. Today, location-aware technologies have blown past the traditional GIS space in terms of number of users and number of deployed apps.

In sectors such as construction, transportation, utilities and municipal infrastructure, geospatial services are playing an increasingly important role even though it is often not obvious. At a recent Distributech conference, the largest electric power distribution conference in North America, of the 400-plus presentations, only a handful mentioned GIS or geospatial in their title or abstract. But of the 18 companies that we interacted with, only two said they were not using geospatial technology in the organisation. Even those that said they weren't using GIS, were in all probability using Google Maps for market analysis, recruitment or other applications.

To put this in context, the annual global construction spend is estimated to be $7 trillion, about 10% of world GDP. Of this, transportation construction accounts for $1 trillion, utilities $2 trillion, and buildings $2.5 trillion. It has been estimated that between 2013 and 2030, $57 trillion in infrastructure investment will be required simply to keep up with projected global GDP growth. Th is includes investment required for transport (road, rail, ports, airports), power, water, and telecommunications. This is nearly 60% more than the $36 trillion spent globally on infrastructure over the past 18 years.

Over half of the world's 7-billion population lives in cities and this is expected to increase as we move toward 9 billion by 2050. In the future, it is projected that there will be many more and larger mega cities like Tokyo, Mumbai, Mexico City, and Moscow. Cities around the world are beginning to realise that the power that lights up their homes and offi ces comes from the convergence of modern information technology, including BIM, geospatial/ GIS, intelligent (connected) network models for electric power, telecommunications, water and wastewater, transportation, and other infrastructure, real-time data management systems, and 3D visualisation.

Buildings use about 40% of global energy, 25% of global water, 40% of global resources, and they emit approximately one-third of global GHG emissions. Faced with rising environmental issues, many governments are mandating energy conservation measures, especially targeting near-zero energy buildings, an industry that is projected to grow by 43% per year to reach $690 billion by 2020.

Building information modeling (BIM) and geospatial technology have central roles to play in improving the energy efficiency of buildings. Several years ago, in an awardwinning paper at a conference organised by Britain’s Association for Geographic Information (AGI), Ann Kemp, then head of GIS at Atkins Global, the design and engineering firm, asked the question ‘BIM isn’t geospatial — or is it?’ and then argued that integration of geospatial and BIM was essential to address the challenges of the 21st century.  The need to integrate geospatial and BIM has been gaining traction for some time now and government mandated energy efficiency for buildings is a major driver of BIM/geospatial convergence.

Construction, power, transportation and municipal infrastructure are important sectors of the world economy. Over the next two decades these will see a massive infusion of investment, motivated by economic development and environmental concerns. In addition, as governments find they have less and less money for capital infrastructure projects, a greater proportion of the investment in infrastructure will come from the private sector, which will drive an increased focus on productivity to improve returns on investment. Th at in turn is driving a transformation of the construction industry which is reflected in accelerating adoption of integrated BIM, geospatial, and 3D visualisation, geospatially enabled data management, and vertical applications based on these technologies.

Excerpted from a recent article. 

Graphics courtesy of e7 Architecture Studio and VNT Consulting.

Reusing integrated geospatial and design data across the construction lifecyle

One of the most important things that impressed me at the Geospatial World Forum 2013 (GWF 2013) conference in Rotterdam is the degree to which in the Netherlands that building information modeling (BIM) and geospatial are perceived to be tightly linked.  In my previous post I gave an overview of a presentation by Bram Mommers, who works for the large private engineering company ARCADIS, on why integrating geospatial into the construction process is important.

Jaap Bakkers, who is with the Rijkswaterstaat, the national water company in the Netherlands,  presented more details about the Concept Library (CB-NL) initiative. 

It is supported by the Dutch Council on Building Information (BIR), which is a joint industry and government council created to foster the development of building information modeling (BIM) in the Netherlands.  It includes government agencies such as Rijkswaterstaat, private construction contractors, and engineering and architural firms.  Government funds it, but most of its expertise is seconded from industry. 

Construction processes in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands many government projects are private-public partnerships (P3), where a private sector firm or consortium is responsible for the design-build-finance-maintain phases of the lifecycle and the government as the owner is responsible for operation.

Many AEC firms are adopting BIM because it is cheaper, reduces risk of budget, schedule overruns, and results in fewer change orders.  They may be motivated to adopt BIM to increase their margin or because they are required to by the owner, which is often a governmental organization such as the Rijkswaterstaat.  Once construction is complete, at commissioning, the owner is handed a large volume of facilities data and as-builts.  But this data is often unusable by the owner because it is incompatible or non-interoperable with the owner's asset management, GIS, and other systems.  This is the primary objective of the Concept Library (CB-NL), to create standards that enable re-use of design and construction data for operations.  This is one example of the data impedance problem, where at every handover, design to construction, construction to operations, data is lost and has to be recreated.

Geospatial in the construction process

Marcel Reuvers, Manager of Geo-standards at Geonovum, gave an overview of some the critical roles that geospatial plays on the construction lifecycle.

• Planning / preparation phase
• Asset management / maintenance
• Managing as-builts

I would add sustainable design which always requires geospatial information about local prevailing weather pattern and the location and orientation of neighbouring structures for right to light, wind, solar heating, natural lighting, solar PV generation potential, and other analysis.

I blogged previously about some fundamental changes to the construction process that will make geospatial central to the construction process.  What has been proposed is that a post-construction survey would become the critical source of reliable asset information in the form of a 3D intelligent model which would be maintained in a geospatially-enabled asset database.   When a new project is initiated,  80-90% of the necessary information would already available in the database making a complete resurvey, as is the current construction practice, unnecessary.  All that is required before design can begin is minimal due diligence to validate the as-builts.   The new process also implies that there is a reliable geospatially-enabled asset database that is maintained thoughout the operations and maintenance phase of the lifecycle.

Concept Library (CB-NL)

In the Netherlands there is already a standard decomposition for buildings called COINS.  The idea is to build on this to create a general approach for decomposing infrastructure as well as buildings and that it suffiiciently general to include geospatial. 

The Concept Library is intended to map different terminology across domains: design, engineering, architecture, construction, asset management, facilities manmagement,and geospatial.  For example, it interelates terms like arch bridge, rail bridge, spanning structure, viaduct, and crossing, each of which may be used by a different domain to refer to the same structure. The business benefit is that it would reduce the data impedance problem, where at every handover in the construction lifecycle, designer to contractor or contractor to owner, data is lost and has to be recreated.

The vision is that the Concept Library is an open database based on a standard ontology  that is searchable and has an open API  so that vendors such as Autodesk, Bentley or ESRI can develop interfaces to it for their products.  

CB=NL and geospatial

CB-NL was initially focused on BIM, but is being extended to include geospatial.  CB-NL enables designers, contractors, asset managers and GIS staff to share a common dataset.  It also makes it possible to automate the process of populating asset and facilities management application and GIS databases for the operations and maintenance phase of the lifecycle.

Concept Library (CB-NL)

A two year project to develop the Concept Library has just been initiated, in January 2013, which is supported by a large number of government and private organizations.   It is using the OWL ontology language, which has been endorsed by the W3C.  It uses tools and constructs from buildingSmart's Semantic Constructs for inputting and editing semantic content.   Real world pilots,  for example, a Rijkswaterstaat water services project and the Schipol, Amsterdam, Almere ring road project, will be used to demnstrate the practicality of the approach.

According to Marcel Reuvers, there are a number of standards that relate to the CB-NL project from a number of standards bodies including the OGC, buildingSmart, ISO/TC211, and LandXML.  Jaap Bakker said that the project team has been in touch wth the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in additon to the buildingSmart Alliance about the CB-NL project.

Integrating geospatial into construction: the challenge

I spent most of last week at the Geospatial World Forum 2013 (GWF 2013) in Rotterdam, which was an amazing event, because of its focus on monetizing geospatial value in vertical industries,  Industries for which there were symposia at GWF 2013 include construction and infrastructure, electic power and gas, mining and exploration, water as a resource, water distribution management, and agriculture in addition to more traditional sectors such as land management, photogrammetry and the environment.

I spent most of my time in Construction and Infrastructure sessions.  There were many absolutely fascinating pesentation on the applicaton of geospatial technology in this sector.  Among the most far-reaching in terms of potential impacts were three or four talks that explicitly addressed the challenge of finding a practical way to integrate geospatial into construction processes.

Value of geospatial information

To put this in context, there is a strong drive in the Netherlands to integrate geospatial information into govenrment organizations.  Geonovum is leading the charge in this area.   By way of motivation there is a very interesting cost-benefit analysis in the context of the European INSPIRE initiaive by Ecorys and Grontmij in November 2009.  The scope of study was the cost and benefits of the collection, maintenance and dissimilation of geographic information, but just within governmental organizations in the Netherlands.  The study did not attempt to estimate the value of geospatial information to society as a whole.  It concluded that over 15 years, the total net benefit to government organizations in the Netherlands would be € 34 million (Ralf Duinmeijer, Joulz ICT private communication).

Cost of poor interoperability

To put this in the context of interoperability and what poor interoperability costs the economy and individual firms, in 2004 in a remarkable study the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) attempted to identify and estimate the efficiency losses in the U.S. capital facilities industry resulting from inadequate interoperability.  The NIST study focussed on interoperability problems attributed to the highly fragmented nature of the industry, the industry’s continued paperbased business practices, a lack of standardization, and inconsistent technology adoption among stakeholders.  It concluded that inadequate interoperability cost the U.S. capital facilities industry $15.8 billion in annually in 2002, but qualified the conclusion by saying that this is likely a conservative figure because there were additional significant inefficiency and lost opportunity costs associated with interoperability problems that were beyond the scope of NIST analysis.

At GWF 2013 it was reported that Rijkswaterstaat, responsible for public works and water management as part of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure, has estimated that poor interoperability costs it € 800 million per year.

Barriers to integrating BIM and geospatial

Bram Mommers, who is with ARCADIS Netherlands, set the stage by looking at what the barriers are that are hindering the integration of geospatial into the constrcution process.  (ARCADIS is a large international company that provides consultancy, design, engineering and management services in the fields of infrastructure, water, environment and buildings.)

Traditionally the challenge has been that civil engineering on one hand and geospatial on the other have been different cultures.  The way Carl Steinitz put is that they work at different scales.  Geospatial scientists deal with the universal, engineers with the very specific. 

Bram gave some examples of these parallel worlds. Geospatial folks make maps, engineers and architects make drawings.  Engineers and architects use CAD or BIM design tools.  Geospatial folks use GIS.  The geospatial standard for buildings and infrastructure is CityGML.  The AEC standard for BIM models is Industry Foundation Classes (IFC).

ARCADIS has been involved in projects that integrated geospatial into the desing process.  On the HOV Nijmegen project it was found that integrating geospatial and engineering design in a single database resulted in a single copy of each data element and multiple use.  It simplified communication and increased the quality of the final design.  It also enabled automated analysis of the consequences of design choices with the result that the planning cycle was shorter.   Bram mentioned several other projects that benefitted from the integration of geospatial with the construction process.

Based on their experience with these projects, Bram and his colleagues concluded that there are three main barriers to the integration of civll engineering and geospatial.

• Semantics - for example, different terms used for the me things by geospatial analysts and civil engineers and designers
• Different topology - examples,  (1) geospatial uses point, lines, and polygons; CAD/BIM uses splines, nurbs, and other parametric curves and treats polygons in a different way from geospatial topology; (2) features with location vs objects with location as an attribute
• Data formats - for example, geospatial data is stored in shape files, GML, and CityCML; CAD/BIM uses DWG, DGN, RVT files, and IFC

Mapping semantics

To address the first issue of semantics, a Dutch initiative called Concept Library (CB-NL) sponsored by the Dutch Council on Building Information (BIR), a joint government and industry initiative, has been created with the objective of developed an open, on-line system to map between the terminologies used in different domains.  The goal is a single integrated model for construction (buildings and infrastructure) that would allow design, construction, maintenance and operations to share the same data.  The concept library would be extended to include geospatial.  The overall goal as Bram stated it is

• Ontology for the build environment - multiple sets of domain terminologies mapped on to it
• One language
• Combines geospatial and construction

The impacts of this appproach that Bram sees are

• Store once, use multiple times - avoid redundant data
• Integrated information management - based on data custodians
• Geolocation as a property of an object - in additon to features

Bram listed a number of organizations in the private construction sector that are supporting this initiative.

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

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.

Geodesign Summit: What is geodesign and why geodesign ?

For over half the nearly 300 people in the audience at the fourth Geodesign Summit in Redlands this was their first Summit.  So there was a serious effort by several speakers including the MC Tom Fisher to define what geodesign is. 

Geodesign is an invented word,  The first use of the word has been traced to 1993, and picked up by ESRI in 2005.   Some of the definitions of the term that I heard at the conference include

Geodesign is a method which tightly couples the creating of design proposals with impact simulations informed by geographic contexts and systems thinking and (normally) supported by digital technology. Mike Flaxman, amended by Steve Ervin

Geodesign makes design decisions data rich.

Geodesign takes GIS analysis into the future.

Geodesign is design in a geographic space.  Bill Miller

Geodesign is a vision for using geographic knowledge to actively and thoughtfully design.  Jack Dangermond

Perhaps the most concise and the most comprehensive are from Carl Steinitz

Geodesign changes geography by design.

It is clear that for serious societal and environmental issues, designing for change cannot be a solitary activity.  Rather, it is inevitably a collaborative endeavor, wth participants from various design professions and geographic sciences, linked by technology from several locations for rapid communication and feedback, and  reliant on transparent communication with the people of the place who are also direct participants.

To understand what geodesign means in practice, the best way is to look at specific projects.  At the conference there were a number of interesting  presentations about diverse projects all of which reference geodesign and which provide examples of what people mean by geodesign in practice.  I plan to blog about several of these.

Why geodesign ?

A common theme in a number of speakers' presentations is that the effects of population growth, urbanization and climate change have reached the point where we urgently need a serious change, this change will require new tools, and geodesign could be one of them.

For example, Tom Fisher offered some pretty frightening statistics which are not hard to find these days.  There was a pervasive sense at the conference that the planet is on the brink and we have to change.  And if we don't change, the implications will be dire.  Bran Ferren put it this way (paraphrased) - this is that moment in the history of the US and of the world when we need to have a new and unfashionable conversation, a long term conversation on a complex topic where there are no simple, short answers.  David Bartlett (IBM Smarter Planet) was more specific.  "It is clear that there is an immediate requirement to significantly and urgently change the way our built environment is managed."

Manufacturing jobs of the future

I blogged previously about an interesting analysis of job creation by the "App Economy" has been conducted for TechNet by Dr.Michael Mandel of South Mountain Economics LLC.  The Technet analysis suggests that there were 155,000 tech jobs in the App Economy as of December 2011 including developer and tech support jobs at both dedicated app developers and at large companies who create apps for them or for others.  This implies that there are roughly 311,000 jobs in App Economy firms, including tech jobs, which require app-related skills, and the corresponding non-tech jobs.  With spillover included, the total number of jobs created in the App Economy is estimated at 466,000 jobs since the iPhone was introduced in 2007.

There is an interesting article in the Washington Post that makes the case that this kind of transformation is going to happen to many manufacturing jobs.  In the future the types of jobs that need to be filled will be different from the jobs that are being filled by workers in the emerging economies of the world. These new jobs in industries that we have not yet even conceived of will require fewer workers with very different skills.  The one thing that is certain  is that we will require a workforce with much different skills and education than what was required for the manufacturing jobs of the last 50 years.  Malaysia is an example of a country that understands this better than most.

New materials, processes and integration

Carl Bass of Autodesk sees three key developments that will define these new manufacturing jobs: new materials, new processes, and complex integration of automated systems.

New types of materials such as carbon nanotubes, ceramic-matrix nanocomposites, and new carbon fibers are being used to create products that are stronger, lighter, more energy efficient and more durable. These materials require new manufacuring processes and more highly skilled employees to manage the more complex manufacturing processes.

In conventional manufacturing, artifacts are produced by "subtractive" manufacturing processes using equipment such as lathes, drills, and milling machines that cut shapes from solid blocks of materials such as steel or wood.  These processes result in a lot of waste material.  In a new method called “additive manufacturing,” parts are produced like you would make a snow ball, building the object up by adding layers of material.  The best example is 3D printing. The process doesn’t produce waste material in the way that "subtractive" manufacturing processes do.  This new manufacturing environment will need 3D designers and operators who can operate and maintain sophisticated computer-based equipment.

Factories will have to become smarter in much the same way that the electric grid is becoming smarter and this means that we will need people will different skills. As in the electric power industry, there will be  greater use of simulation to analyze how manufacturing systems respond to changes such as introducing a new material or changing a feature of a product. Manufacturing engineers will need to become more adept at dealing with virtual control systems, simulation and other such technologies.

UN Millennium Development Goal for sustainable access to clean drinking water likely to be achieved

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are intended to reduce poverty, inequality, hunger and illness. Goernments and organizations around the world pledged to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

Goal 7 Ensure Environmental Sustainability

Challenge: 884 million people worldwide do not have access to safe drinking water and 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation services.

Target 7.C:  Halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation.

Status: The world will meet or even exceed the drinking water target by 2015 if current trends continue. By that time, an estimated 86 per cent of the population in developing regions will have gained access to improved sources of drinking water, up from 71 per cent in 1990. Four regions — Northern Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Asia and South-Eastern Asia — have already met the target.

Class of 2011 engineering graduates lead in starting salaries

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) conducts an annual survey of starting salaries of U.S. college graduates by compiling data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, and a master data set developed by Job Search Intelligence.

The Salary Survey for 2012 for the college class of 2011 found that the average starting salary is $41,701,  2.3 percent higher than the Class of 2010 average. In addition the survey found that average salaries have increased across all the sectors that the survey monitors.

engineering graduates had the highest average starting salary $61,872 which perhaps reflects the increasing shortage that is facing many sectors of engineering, especially utilities, as experienced engineers retire at an increasing rate.