Between the Poles

Commercial operation of UAVs beyond-line-of-sight coming soon

In general the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for commercial purposes is illegal in the U.S. although this is changing.  In Canada regulation of UAVs is different.  You can fly a UAV that weighs less than 25 kg for work or research  without permission.  However, there are severe restrictions.  You must have at least $100,000 liability insurance, keep your UAV in direct line of sight, always fly during daylight and in good weather (no clouds, snow or icy conditions), avoid flying close to airports, in populated areas or near moving vehicles, and fly below 90 meters.  The operator must be trained to understand airspace classification and structure, weather and notice to airmen (NOTAM) reporting services, aeronautical charts and relevant sections of the Canadian Aviation Regulations.  To relax any of these restrictions, you will have to apply to Transport Canada for a Special Flight Operations Certificate which will require 20 working days to be issued.  Transport Canada has issued thousands of these since 2000.

But this is changing.  Today Ian Glenn, founder and CEO/CTO of ING Robotic Aviation, gave an extremely knowledgeable talk about commercial UAV operation in Canada current and future.  He expects that within the next 12 months, legislation will be introduced that will significantly relax the current restrictive regulation of the commercial operation of UAVs without a Special Flight Operations Certificate.

The next step will be relaxing the line-of-sight restriction.  Ian's perspective is that the key to commercial beyond-line-of-sight UAV operation will be equipping UAVs with automatic dependent surveillance – broadcast (ADS–B).  An aircraft equipped ADS–B determines its position via satellite navigation and periodically broadcasts it, so that it can be tracked. The information can be received by air traffic control ground stations and by other aircraft, which provides situational awareness and allows self separation without ground control intervention. ADS–B is automatic -  it requires no pilot or external input - so it can be included on a UAV.  The cost of equipping an aircraft with ADS-B has come down and is currently on the order of $1000.  This could mean that commercial operation of UAVs equipped with ADS-B will come to Canada sooner because Canada is already using ADS-B for Air Traffic Control. (It is part of the US Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen)).  Ian suggested that we could see commercial beyond-line-of-sight operation of UAVs equipped with ADS-B within Canada in the next few years.  That will dramatically open up the range of applications for commercial UAVs.

Using UAVs to create digital surface models for northern peatlands research

I just attended a fascinating presentation with the unprepossessing title of "CCRS/NRC/McGill Scientists - TOPICS OF PEATLANDS AND THE MER BLEUE BOG."  This was about a new project called MBASSS initiated by scientists from the Canada Centre for Remote Processing (CCRS), National Research Council (NRC), and McGill University to acquire airborne hyperspectral imagery and ground-based measurements for the purpose of validating satelllite optical earth observation (EO) multi-hyperspectral data products for northern/subarctic peatlands. 

The world has about about 3 million square km of northern boreal peatlands, which are huge carbon stores, estimated to contain 200 to 600 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon.  About one million square km of these are in Canada.  Peatlands act as both a carbon source and a carbon sink in the terrestrial carbon cycle. The net effect of northern peatlands is a small to moderate carbon sink, removing an estimated 49 billion kg/yr (Tg/yr) of carbon from the atmosphere.

75% of these peatlands are bogs and one of these is Mer Bleue a 28 square km bog very near to Ottawa.  Since it is much easier to study a bog that is 13 km from Ottawa than to travel a thousand km to subarctic Canada, Mer Bleue, which already has a peatland observatory, was chosen for the study. 

Mer Bleue is normally a net sink for carbon, removing on average 60 grams of carbon per square meter per year (g C m-2 yr -1), but this can vary from year to year depending on factors such as water level.  Historically it has ranged from 10 to 128 g C m-2 yr -1.

Conventional overflights for the project are being conducted by the NRC using a fixed wind aircraft (Twin Beaver).  But as an alternative, Matt Maloney of CCRS has conducted trial flights with three different UAVs.  At the low end with a Phantom 2 equipped wiith a GoPro camera.  The other devices are a Spyder PX8 and an Aeromapper EV2 with a Sony camera.  He had to get Transport Canada Flight Certification which requires line of site, daylight only and less than 300m altitude operation.  The area covered by the UAV flights was 500 square meters.

He used a technique called structure from motion which takes the 2D images captured by the UAV and stitches them into point clouds, ortho mosaics, and digital surface models.  By way of comparison with a typical fixed wing overflight equipped with LiDAR which typically generates two points per square meter, the point clouds captured from the UAV have a density of 500 points per square meter.  The ortho mosaics and digital surface models captured with the UAVs (and using ground control points)were quite impressive with 3-5 cm pixels and rmse less than 5 cm.

Smart energy for smart cities market to reach $20.9 billion by 2024

Urbanization is a worldwide phenomenon.  According to the World Bank, 54 percent of the world's population lives in urban areas today.  By 2045, the number of people living in cities will increase by 1.5 times to 6 billion, adding 2 billion more urban residents.  With more than 80 percent of global GDP generated in cities, urbanization can accelerate economic development, but it has to be managed in a way that decreases energy intensity (energy per unit of GDP).  

Smart city technology is becoming an essential element in the development of the world's megacities.  For example, the new Indian government's budget includes an allocation for initiating the development of 100 smart cities.  Songdo IDB in Korea and Fujisawa in Japan are two smart cities already under development. China has 36 smart cities in development and a low carbon model city in Tianjin.  Singapore plans to become a smart nation by 2015.  Iskandar is Malaysia's first smart city.  The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) incorporates smart city concepts. 

According to a recent report, the global smart cities market is forecasted to grow from $410 billion in 2014 to $1.1 trillion by 2019 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.5%.  This includes smart homes, intelligent building automation, energy management, smart health, smart education, smart water, smart transportation, smart security, and related services.  Most of this activity is expected to occur in Asia and the Middle East.

Technologies and trends such as smart cities, smart grids, sensor webs, the Internet of Things (IoT), facilities and asset management, indoor and outdoor navigation, energy performance modeling and real-time, “big data” analytics are important for urban planners.  In these technology domains, open standards encourage the sharing of information. The OGC Urban Planning Domain Working Group intends to discover requirements for open spatial standards in information systems involved in the planning, design, use, maintenance and governance of publicly accessible spaces.

According to the IPCC urban areas accounted for 67 – 76 % of energy use and 71 – 76 % of energy-related CO2 emissions in 2006.  Cities are going to have to adopt a leading role in transforming to efficient, non-carbon energy, if we are going to be able to achieve a sustainable level of economic development. 

In preparation for COP21 in Paris, all of the major developing nations have committed to decreases their energy intensity. For example, India has just released its commitments (INDC) to reducing emissions prior to the Paris COP meeting.  The challenge for India is tackling climate change while at the same time improving the standard of living of its third of a billion poor.

According to Navigant worldwide 96 cities that have committed to becoming 100% renewable.  These include Vancouver, Canada and San Francisco, California.  According to the annual ranking by the Global Green Economy Index (GGEI) Vancouver is the world's fourth greenest city.  According to the GGEI the top three greenest cities are Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Stockholm.  The countries corresponding to these cities (Denmark, Netherlands, and Sweden) also rank high, in the top 5 country rankings.  Canada is 12th. The Nordic cities have achieved their high standing with the help of their respective national governments, whereas Vancouver has achieved its high green ranking on its own with little help from the federal government.  Two years ago the Dutch Ministry of the Interior initiated a joint project with the Municipal government of The Hague (Den Haag) to reduce and stabilize energy usage and costs in downtown Den Haag.  The study area is roughly about a square kilometer where the buildings are large and owned for the most part by the National and Municipal governments.

Most of the world's electric power utilities have adopted a smart grid strategy at some level.  This can involve distributed renewable energy (DER), reduced emissions from existing fossil fuel generation and various energy efficiency programs.   Navigant Research has just released a report that investigates the fundamental shift in the way cities manage energy and their relationship with electric power utilities.  It focusses on DER, demand management, EV vehicles and charging infrastructure and energy efficiency.   The major technology suppliers according to Navigant  are ABB, Accenture, AT&T, Cisco Systems, Hitachi, Huawei, Itron, Oracle, S&C Electric Company, SAP, Schneider Electric, Siemens, SSN, and Toshiba.

Navigant Research projects that the global smart energy for smart cities technology market will grow from $7.3 billion in annual revenue in 2015 to $20.9 billion by 2024.  That represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4%. 

It should be noted that this analysis does not include energy efficient buildings the market for which Navigant has estimated in a separate study to be $307.3 billion in 2014 growing to $623.0 billion in 2023.

Energy efficient building market to grow to $623.0 billion in 2023.

Energy performance modeling for buildings is a new field, but one that is getting a lot of interest under the impetus of government mandates and incentives.  It's so new that there is no set of standard best practices.  Energy modelers are having to make it up as they go.  But this area is growing rapidly, and as government mandates for zero-energy buildings kick in, it is expected to grow exponentially.  A Navigant Research study estimated that the energy efficient building market reached $307.3 billion in 2014 and that it will grow to $623.0 billion in 2023.

According to the 2014 scorecard released by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) Germany is #1 out of the 16 nations studied in the World for energy efficiency.  In Germany buildings currently account for 40 percent of power consumption and a third of CO₂ emissions. 

In September 2010 the German Government released a 40 year masterplan for revolutionizing the German energy supply that includes an aggressive plan for energy conservation focusing on reducing the energy demand from buildings.  According to the plan new insulation standards are to be introduced the government wants all buildings in Germany to be refurbished in line with new standards by 2050. It also wants to cut the national heating requirement by 20 percent by 2020 and by 80 percent by 2050.  Germany is part of the EU which is very aggressive in improving the energy efficiency of buildings. 

The EU Energy Saving Ordinance mandates a 25 percent reduction in energy use for all new residential and non-residential buildings built from January 1, 2016. And as of 2021, the EU’s nearly zero energy standard will apply to all new buildings.

The EIA has just released information on building energy efficiency programs in China.  Unlike many other countries, the Chinese government has focused a lot of regulatory attention on existing buildings. The overall objective of the Chinese government is to raise the level of existing buildings to satisfy regulations governing new construction. In 2011, the government implemented regulations that mandated a 10% reduction in energy consumption per square meter for commercial buildings by the end of 2015.  It also mandated a 15% reduction for commercial buildings with more than 20,000 square meters of floor area.

Energy certification of buildings is a key policy instrument for reducing the energy consumption and improving the energy performance of new and existing buildings.  In the U.K. since 2008 public buildings over 1,000 m² must display a Display Energy Certificate (DEC).  DECs document the actual energy usage of a building and look similar to the energy labels provided on new cars and electrical appliances.  In the U.S. six cities and two states have passed laws requiring energy benchmarking of existing buildings. It is estimated that these laws will affect 4 billion ft² of floor space in major real estate markets.  In Australia commercial buildings 2000 m² and over are required by the Building Energy Efficiency Disclosure Act 2010 to have a Building Energy Efficiency Certificate (BEEC).  In Jakarta a new green building code became mandatory for existing and new buildings in early 2013.  The code covers all large buildings in Jakarta including office buildings, shopping malls and apartment buildings larger than 50,000 square meters; hotels and healthcare facilities larger than 20,000 square meters; and educational facilities larger than 10,000 square meters.

The European Union's SUNSHINE program is intended as a step towards toward standards for measuring the energy performance of buildings and a way to  contribute to improving the energy efficiency of buildings.  SUNSHINE is based on open standards such as CityGML from the OGC. 

In the United States according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), buildings are responsible for 65 % of electricity consumption.  An important motivation for energy efficient buildings in many jurisdictions are aggressive building codes that push energy efficiency.   For example, the 2013 California Green Building Standards Code (Title 24) is one of the first “green” building codes.   Other motivations are customer driven certification such as LEED and other "green" certification - LEED v4 incorporates up to 18 credits for demand response -  and financial incentives from local governments and power utilities to reduce energy consumption, peak load or both.

Government mandates for zero energy buildings (ZEB) have been introduced in E.U., the U.S. and Japan.   According to Navigant Research, global ZEB revenue is expected to grow from $629.3 million in 2014 to $1.4 trillion by 2035.

Energy performance modeling is an essential tool for estimating the energy requirements of a new or existing building.  An energy performance analysis can determine how much energy a building will consume in a year, assess the most cost effective insulation and glazing, and assess other things that can be done as part of the building design to optimize energy usage.  An energy analysis requires data - geometry of the building, performance characteristics of materials, geolocation and orientation of the building, and so on.  Simulation applications include local environmental conditions and involve thermal modeling, daylight and airflow simulations.  Thermal modeling includes energy consumption, thermal comfort, CO₂ emissions, renewable energy integration, and electric power load. Natural lighting includes visual comfort (glare) and the reduction of energy use through natural lighting.  Airflow simulation includes external wind simulation, internal airflow simulation, clean room ventilation, and reduction in electrical load as a result of using natural ventilation.

There are many energy analysis tools available (lighting, thermal, emissions, water usage, etc) , many are very complex, and the volume of data that is required is increasing exponentially.  Many energy modelers follow a best-of-breed approach so interoperablity is a major challenge in improving productivity in energy performance analysis.

Increasingly for energy modelers the natural place to start is with a Building Information Model (BIM).  There are several reasons for this.  First of all it is what many of the energy performance analysis packages expect and it is supported by the gbXML standard.  Secondly it allows all the information required by the architect, engineers and construction contractors to be accessed in one place.  And thirdly it helps in communicating the results of the energy performance analysis to the people who need it including heating and cooling, lighting and other types of engineers, all  of whom may require the same  information but communicated in different ways.

One third of Be Inspired Awards involve mapping, managing, rehabbing and replacing aging infrastructure

Worldwide there is increasing demand from building and infrastructure owners for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a building or infrastructure. This represents a distinct break with the design/build tradition which has dominated construction for years.  At the Year in Infrastructure conference in London, a dominant theme was the growing recognition of the importance of full lifecycle management of infrastructure.  I found it symptomatic of the direction of the construction industry that fully one third of the 54 finalists for the annual Be Inspired Awards involved mapping, rehabbing, retrofitting, replacing and managing existing infrastructure.  This is my classification of these Be Inspired finalists;

Be Inspired Finalists

1 Full lifecycle workflow
2 Replacement
7 Renovation, rehab, retrofit
3 Mapping existing infrastructure
1 Historic site protection
5 Utility asset management

Full life cycle management

Patrick MacLeamy, Chairman of buildingSMART and CEO of HOK, has been pushing a very simple message about the U.S. construction industry for years.  Buildings are too expensive, are too inefficient to operate and maintain, and don't last long. As a result the U.S. construction industry is falling behind the Nordic countries, the U.K. and Singapore.  His solution is a full life cycle approach to construction.  Information has to be shared between owners, designers, contractors, operations and facilities management over the entire life cycle of the building or infrastructure.

Buildings

Over 50% of the cost of maintaining a building is operations and maintenance which is comprised of administration, maintenance and repairs, and restoration projects.  In several countries BIM has become essential for design and construction.  But many including the UK government believe that the full value of BIM can only be found during the operational life of the building where the majority of the life cycle costs occur.  The UK government has said that "the 20% saving refers to CapEx cost savings however we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle".

Road and highway infrastructure

Highway construction is being transformed, due in part to the arrival of autonomous vehicles.  I've blogged about the startling (at least to traditional construction contractors) vision of the future of highway construction of the Chief of Surveys at the Oregon Department of Transportation (DoT) which targets the full lifecycle of highway assets from planning through design and construction and operation and maintainenance.  Some large construction projects are already being designed, built and operated and maintained with a full lifecycle perspective.

Utility infrastructure

Industry surveys report that up to 80 percent of a utility's resources and budget can be spent on operating and maintaining existing utility infrastructure.   Surveys also show that aging utility infrastructure is a top priority for most utilities.

Be Inspired Awards: Mapping, Monitoring, Rehabbing, and Replacing Infrastructure

One of the projects focused specifically on full lifecycle data management for highway construction.  The project, which was submitted by the Roads Directorate, Denmark, is for the $ 580 million 39-kilometer Herning – Holstebro highway which includes eight interchanges, four railway crossings, and five bridges.  The important achievement of the project was to create a digital workflow with meaningful requirements for sharing data among disciplines and across the entire project lifecycle.  The project was a finalist for the year's Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Roads.

Seven of the finalists' submissions involved renovation, rehabbing, and retrofit.  An outstanding example of a rehab project is the Bond Street to Baker Street Tunnel Remediation Project.  This is a London Underground  project in the UK.  It involved the replacement of the existing elastoplastic concrete lining of a 215-meter tunnel segment on the Jubilee Line with a spheroidal graphite iron lining - all while the line was running at full capacity.  This achievement won this year's Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Rail and Transit at the Year in Infrastructure 2015 conference.

Two of the finalists' projects involved replacement. An example of a replacement project was the Decommissioning and Replacement of Del Rio Bridge on US 20  this was carried out by Harper-Leavitt Engineering for the Idaho Transportation Department with minimum disruption to traffic.

Five of the finalists submitted projects that involved monitoring and extracting more value from existing transportation and utility infrastructure including rail, electric substations, electric and water and waste water distribution networks.

An example is a project submitted by SA Water which won the Be Inspired Innovation in Asset Performance Management Award.  The project involved integrating a hydraulic model and an operational analytics tool with network sensors to help them optimize their network.  These tools enable them to optimize chlorine dosing for different water sources (runoff, desalinization, rivers), minimize electric power costs, and improve water quality by mapping water age across their entire network. SA Water have not only been able to reduce their power bill by A$3 million, but also have cut their network operating costs by nearly a A$ million.  It has also resulted in improved water quality.  More fundamentally it has given them much greater insight into sources of revenue and the costs of various aspects of operating a water network.

Four of the finalist projects involved mapping and historic site protection.  An example is a gas main project submitted by Utility Mapping Services Inc.  This project involved creating a 3D map of underground utilities along a stretch of highway with complex utility infrastructure woven through dense commercial and residential areas with limited right-of-way and heavy traffic congestion.  Most critically from a safety perspective, there were no utility strikes on the project.  As a result the 3D model is credited with reducing construction time from 10 to 7 weeks.  Most importantly from a budget perspective, there were no change orders and the total cost of the project came in at 10-15% less than estimated in the absence of a 3D model.

Another example is a project submitted by the Singapore Land Authority (SLA).  Singapore intends to be the world's first "smart nation".  Part of this initiative involves developing a virtual Singapore that is intended to be the source of authoritative information about Singapore for use by government agencies.  The project involves capturing large amounts of data using multiple rapid mapping technologies including oblique imagery, airborne laser scanning, mobile laser scanning, and terrestrial scanning.  The data has been compiled into 3D city model in a single database repository which includes geometry, topology, semantics and appearance.  The database relies on CityGML, a standard managed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), for the database schema and for data exchange.  The total volume of data is more than 50 terabytes. The database is open and accessible to all government agencies. The most challenging part of the project has been the development of business processes and technologies for ensuring the data remains current.  At the the Year in Infrastructure conference in London the SLA the won the annual Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Government.

Modeling underground utilities in 3D reduces construction time and costs

The location of existing underground utility infrastructure  is more often than not poorly known which creates significant risk for infrastructure and highway construction projects.  In a gas line construction project which Utility Mapping Services (UMS) submitted for a Be Inspired Award, UMS diverged from normal construction practice by first creating a  3D model of the existing underground and above ground infrastructure.  During construction there were no utility strikes and as a result there were no change orders and the construction project was completed in 7 instead of the expected 10 weeks. 

I had a chance to chat with Donald Haines, Senior Engineer, and Cameron Greer, Project Engineer at UMS.  The project involved constructing an eight inch high pressure natural gas pipeline along a major highway SR510. The customer was Puget Sound Energy which is responsible for electricity and gas in the Puget Sound area.  The Washington DOT was also involved in the project because the new pipeline runs within the SR510 right of way.

A major risk was that the project corridor includes complex utility infrastructure woven through dense commercial and residential areas with limited right-of-way and heavy traffic congestion.  Because of the complexity of the underground utility infrastructure it was decided at the beginning of the project to develop a 3D model of the existing underground infrastructure.  The model enabled the design team to adjust the pipe elevation and horizontal alignment to avoid potential utility conflicts during the design phase.  The 3d model of existing utility infrastructure avoided unnecessary utility relocations and the associated construction delays and contractor change orders. It also allowed for tighter contractor bid estimates by providing a more accurate design to the contractors. 

UMS' subsurface utility engineering (SUE) services group were familiar with new remote sensing technology such as ground penetrating radar (GPR) and electromagnetic detection (SPAR300) which allowed them to acquire 3-D location data for  underground utility infrastructure.  Application of new SUE technology created much greater value for the customer because UMS can now clearly convey to the client the issues presented by existing infrastructure and work with their design and construction teams and the utility infrastructure owners to minimize utility relocations and avoid surprises from buried unknowns.

Starting with a 2D basemap, the underground survey was conducting using several technologies, including SPAR300 and GPR, and potholing for validation.  In addition to the expected utility infrastructure, the survey detected undocumented abandoned utility lines which highlights an important advantage of the new remote sensing technologies.  The data was captured and integrated to create a 3D model using Trimble software.  The 3D model formed the basis for the design for the new gas pipeline.    The 3D model detected 170 conflicts, points of intersection of the design for the new pipeline with other utilities.  Several alternative routes were assessed and the costs and benefits of each were computed and compared in order to determine the optimal routing for the new pipeline.  3D visualization of the alternative routes helped the designers show Puget Sound Energy and the Washington DOT the advantages of alternative routes and allowed changes to be made to the design live in front of the customer.  One interesting wrinkle is that the design had to avoid conflicting with new sewer line which had not been built yet.  One of the  existing sewer lines was scheduled to be replaced by a significantly larger one in the near future.

A major advantage of the 3D model is that it reduces the risk of utility strikes during construction.  On projects where automated construction is used, exclusion zones can be created from the underground 3D model that prevent the machinery from striking utility infrastructure.

The 3D model helped in other ways.  The project required two variances from the Washington DOT which were granted in record time because the 3D model showed so clearly why and where they were required.  The 3D model helped to minimize highway disruptions to the public.  Most critically from a safety as well as cost perspective, there were no utility strikes on the project.  As a result the 3D model is credited with reducing construction time from 10 to 7 weeks.  Most importantly from a budget perspective, there were no change orders and the total cost of the project came in at 10-15% less than estimated in the absence of a 3D model.

PG&E's distributed substation design solution wins Be Inspired Award at YII2015

Smart substations are an essential component of the next generation of the electric power grid.  But for many utilities they have become a severe bottleneck because of limited substation design resources.  Enabling external contractors to participate efficiently in substation design is becoming an important strategy for alleviating this problem.  After a year in which Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) had failed to complete 60% of its substation design projects, PG&E embarked on an innovative project to enable external contractors to participate efficiently in the substation design process.  This achievement won this year's Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Utilities at the Year in Infrastructure 2015 conference in London.

PG&Es Substation Engineering Services had deployed a new substation design system that integrated electric and physical design to approximately 80 internal design employees.  The new system halved the average time required per drawing from 24 to 12 hours.  This resulted in efficiency gains of about $ 5 million in savings per year on contracted projects. 

But  PG&E found that it still had a substation design backlog.  PG&E's strategy for accelerating substation design relied on the expanded use of external contractors to augment its stretched internal resources.  However, as its use of external contractors grew, PG&E found that efficiency decreased because the overhead associated with external resources was very high compared to internal resources.  PG&E's solution was to develop a distributed engineering design system that allowed engineers anywhere in the world to collaborate efficiently on substation design.  PG&E’s distributed substation design environment reduced the average time required per drawing for external contractors by a third, making external contractors nearly as efficient as internal designers.  Altogether the distributed engineering design system saved $7.3 million in costs annually.  Also since less travel was required, a side effect of the project was a reduced carbon footprint.

Electric power transmission line vegetation management using UAVs

Over the past couple of years I have followed the regulation of the commercial use of UAVs in the U.S. In the back of my mind, I have always thought that the application where there would be a tremendous cost benefit from UAVs is monitoring transmission lines for vegetation management.  Recently a utility in Southern California has begun flying UAVs to test the concept.

In general the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for commercial purposes is illegal in the U.S., but there are ways to gain FAA authorization to fly UAVs commercially:

• Section 333 Exemption – grants of exemption for UAVs to perform commercial operations in low-risk, controlled areas
• Special Airworthiness Certificate (SAC) – the design and construction of the proposed UAV must be described in detail as well as how and where it is intended to be flown.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued Section 333 grants of exemption for commercial UAVs for general aerial surveys (Trimble, Woolpert), construction monitoring, agriculture, on and offshore oil and gas inspections, and real estate.

In February of this year the FAA proposed to amend its regulations to adopt rules for the commercial operation of UAVs in the National Airspace System (NAS).  The FAA has suggested some types of operations the proposed new rules would allow.  These include "power-line/pipeline inspection in hilly or mountainous terrain." 

The FAA's proposed rule would limit commercial UAV flights to daylight-only, visual-line-of-sight (VLOS) operations.  The unmanned aircraft must remain close enough to the operator for the operator to be capable of seeing the aircraft with unaided vision.  The UAV is not permitted to operate over any people not directly involved in its operation.  Its maximum airspeed must be100 mph or less (87 knots). It cannot fly higher than 500 feet above ground level or above 18,000 feet of altitude. Minimum weather visibility is 3 miles from the control station. The UAV cannot be operated from a moving vehicle or aircraft.  The UAV must weigh less than 55 pounds (25 kg). However, there does not appear to be any restriction on total flight time.

An operator of a UAV would be required to be at least 17 years old, pass an initial aeronautical knowledge test at an FAA-approved knowledge testing center, be vetted by the Transportation Security Administration, obtain an unmanned aircraft operator certificate with a small UAS (small unmanned aircraft systems) rating, and pass a recurrent aeronautical knowledge test every 24 months.

The FAA's proposed rules would exclude long range UAVs such as the Silent Falcon, which is claimed to be the first UAV  capable of meeting long endurance mission profiles typical of many commercial, civil, public safety, and other operations. Its daytime endurance is estimated to be 5 to 12 hours depending on wing configuration, weather, and flight profile.

According to a report in Greentech Media, in July of this year San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) became the first utility in the country to begin a pilot program under a FAA Special Airworthiness Certificate. SDG&E plans to fly a pair of UAVs along a half-mile-wide, 2.5-mile-long stretch of transmission line right-of-way in remote eastern San Diego County.  The objective is to demonstrate that UAVs are safe and effective and could replace helicopter flights for transmission line monitoring including vegetation management.  Replacing helicopter flights, which are typically thousands of dollars per hour, with a UAV would dramatically reduce the cost of vegetation management for transmission lines. 

SDG&E appears to be operating its UAVs within the rules proposed by the FAA in February.  According to Greentech Media, SDG&E is operating its UAVs with the line-of-sight rule.  Each UAV is always in sight of the pilot flying it and the pilot is not in a moving vehicle.   The current transmission line being used for the test is in a remote, unpopulated area where there is little risk of the UAV flying over people not involved in operating it.

Singapore's national 3D model wins Be Inspired Award at YII2015

At the the Year in Infrastructure conference in London the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) won the annual Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Government.  Comprising only 700 square kilometers for the entire nation, land is a valuable and critical national resource for Singapore and the Singapore Land Authority is responsible for making the most of the resource. 

Specifically SLA is responsible for the national land management system and for all geographical information (GIS) management.  At the Be Inspired Awards at the Year in Infrastructure 2015 conference in London, I had an opportunity to chat with Victor Khoo and Kean Huat Soon.  Victor Khoo is Deputy Director Land Survey at the SLA and Kean Huat Soon is a Senior Surveyor and the technical lead for the project.

Singapore intends to be the world's first "smart nation".  Part of this initiative involves developing a virtual Singapore that is intended to be the source of authoritative information about Singapore for use by government.  The current priority is a 3D model of buildings and below and above ground infrastructure.

The Mapping Singapore in 3D project is financed 50% by the Government of Singapore and 50% by agencies, primarily the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) and the Public Utilities Board (PUB).   Several government agencies including the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) and the Housing Development Board (HDB) are already using it.  CAAS finds it essential for maintaining aviation glide paths over the city as does the PUB for assessing the impact of flooding. HDB uses it for planning purposes. 

The project involves capturing large amounts of data using multiple rapid mapping technologies including oblique imagery, airborne laser scanning, mobile laser scanning, and terrestrial scanning.  The data is compiled into 3D city model in a single database repository. The database includes geometry, topology, semantics and appearance.  It relies on CityGML, a standard managed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), for the database schema and for data exchange.  The project works at the Level of Detail (LOD) Level 1-3. The data is stored in a single geospatially-enabled relational database (Oracle Spatial).  The total volume of data is more than 50 terabytes.The most challenging part of the project has been the development of business processes and technologies for ensuring the data remains current. The database is open and accessible to all government agencies. 

3D Cadastre

Victor Khoo is also responsible for developing a 3D cadastre for Singapore which is a separate project at SLA.  A 3D cadastre is especially critical for Singapore for several reasons.  85 % of the population of Singapore lives in public high rise buildings. Underground space is heavily used and underground density is increasing.  Land developers are being very creative and packaging complex volumetric parcels that include both underground and above ground. 

A 3D cadastre has data, legal, system and process dimensions.  The legislation required for the legal aspect is already in place.  The system and processes are intended to be completed by the end of 2016.  With respect to data a 3D GIS is being populated at SLA starting with 2D land parcel data.

Land surveyors are an essential part of the 3D cadastre project.  As a first step surveyors are required to use electronic data exchange instead of paper (Singapore mandated electronic submissions for building permitting over a decade ago.)  Singapore has decided to support ePlan LandXML as an open standard for the exchange of survey data.  In 2013 Singapore joined the ePlan working group which is focussed on developing a digital protocol for the transfer of cadastral data between the surveying Industry and government.  The working group was originally made up of technical experts from the eight states and territories of Australia and New Zealand working in the management of cadastral data.

By way of background LandXML is a widely used standard used by the transportation and land development sectors.  A subset of the LandXML standard including alignment, road, rail, survey, terrain, land parcels, drainage, wastewater, and water distribution systems is being incorporated in a new standard called InfraGML which is supported by the OGC. Its focus is alignments/roads, survey, and land parcels and it synchronizes with the concurrent efforts by buildingSMART International in its development of infrastructure-based Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs), for example, for alignments, as well as with CityGML and TransXML. The first public draft of the OGC's proposed UML conceptual model for land parcels and the built environment was released for public comment at the beginning of the year.

BIM IFC and CityGML

An outstanding issue is the integration of BIM models into the Singapore city model.  A number of groups are working on a way of integrating CityGML and the BIM Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard.  An example is the Dutch 3D standard. 

Energy modeling for cities

The European SUNSHINE (Smart Urban Services for Higher Energy Efficiency) project has found a data model within the INSPIRE standard that is adequate for energy performance modeling for cities.  CityGML has strongly influenced the development of the INSPIRE BU model, both for 2D and for 3D profiles.  Many use cases that were considered for INSPIRE BU require a three-dimensional representation of buildings such as a building information model (BIM). Examples are noise emission simulation and mapping, solar radiation computation or the design of an infrastructure project. To allow for that, the building representation in Level of Detail (LoD1 - LoD4) of CityGML has been added to the INSPIRE BU model as a core 3D profile. For large scale energy performance at the urban level, the SUNSHINE team concluded that detailed interior elements of each building are not required.  It is possible to work at a simple Level of Detail 3 (LOD3) and just include elements like roofs, envelope walls, and windows.

Year in Infrastructure 2015: Open electric power network documentation in the UK

At the Year in Infrastructure conference in London in the Utilities breakout session I was invited to participate in an industry panel discussion on "Repair, Rehab, and Replacement of Aging Infrastructure".  The two panelists I joined were Dr Nicole Metje, Senior Lecturer at Birmingham University, whose   research focus is mapping and assessing the condition of buried utilities (a favorite topic of mine and will come back on this), and Paul Jewell, with Western Power Distribution (WPD), part of the NYSE listed PPL group.  Paul is Policy Manager for WPD, responsible for WPD’s approach to innovation as it brings together the work of the Future Networks Team with the more traditional elements of management of an electricity distribution network.

One of the topics that came up early in the discussion was documentation about underground utility networks including geolocation.  My experience in North America is that this information is treated as national security information and is not publicly available.  I assumed that this was fairly typical of the rest of the world (although several years ago I did find a water utility in New Zealand, North Shore City, that had made its water network documentation available on the web).  In the discussion Paul interjected that Western Power Distribution had made its network documentation including maps publicly available.  I was very (pleasantly) surprised.  I have blogged about countries, states, counties and cities making their data open.  But open data and utilities almost seemed an oxymoron.  (An exception is the  Green Button program for consumers, which started as a United States Department of Energy initiative and was conceived as a way of bringing innovation into utilities.)

I followed up after the discussion and checked the Western Power Distribution web site (The site says that domestic/private customers should request plans using the phone number, email or postal address provided on the site.) Companies and organizations are referred to LinesearchbeforeUdig (LSBUD) which is a free service that allows a user to check their planned excavation against over 50 asset owners’ utility assets which include underground and overhead pipes and cables in the electricity, gas, high pressure fuel, water and fibre optic networks.  WPD is a member utility of the LSBUD service.  All that seems to be required to become a user of LSBUD is providing a UK street address and a valid email address.

This seems similar to the Dutch KLIC-Online system.  In 2010 the Netherlands switched to a digital online call-before-you-dig system.  With KLIC-Online the turnaround time for call-before-you-dig calls was reduced to hours compared to the manual system. Both the manual and KLIC-Online one-Call systems were voluntary until 2008 when made KLIC was made mandatory for both network operators and excavators with severe penalties for excavators who circumvented the system. In the Netherlands there is also a charge of € 29.50 for every excavation request, whereas the English system is free.

One of the 50 utilities participating in LSBUD is ESP Utilities Group Ltd, which operates gas and electricity infrastructure networks across Britain.  It reports that LSBUD has meant that 99% of excavation enquiries are responded to automatically within 10 minutes.