Between the Poles

Satellite images used to track illegal fishing successfully used in court case

Images from DigitalGlobe were used to track illegal fishing and provided evidence in court to support the seizure of a Thai vessel suspected of illegal fishing and labour abuses by the Indonesian Navy.  Indonesia has won a two-year court case that confirms the legality of the Indonesian Navy's seizure of a Thai vessel linked to human trafficking and illegal fishing in Indonesian waters.

The vessel intentionally turned off the automatic identification system (AIS) that among other things allowed the ship's location to be tracked. The vessel, the Silver Sea 2, was identified from DigitalGlobe satellite images when it was in Papua New Guinea waters, receiving illegal Indonesian catch from two fishing trawlers in a process known as transshipment. It was captured by an Indonesian Navy vessel off the island of Sumatra after returning to Indonesian waters.

Geocoordinated BIM modeling benefits build and operate projects

Integrated BIM and geospatial modeling provide greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance for an extended period after construction. At the Year in Infrastructure 2017 (YII2017) in Singapore the winner of the Be Inspired Award for BIM Advancements in Utilities was a Malaysian construction company that chose geocoordinated 3D digital design for a transmission and substation project. A contributing factor in the decision to use geocordinated digital modeling was the requirement of the project to operate and maintain the substation for 25 years before handoff to the utility.

There are more and more projects that require maintenance or operations and maintenance for an extended period after construction. I blogged previously about projects in the Netherlands initiated by Rijkswaterstaat called design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM) projects. The Rijkswaterstaat (RWS) board is convinced of the benefits of BIM and BIM/geospatial integration and rolled out BIM/geospatila for four DBFM projects with the intention to require BIM on all DBFM-contracts in the future. PESTECH International Berhad, the winner of the Be Inspired BIM Advancements in Utilities Distribution & Transmission award for its project Automation and Integration of Substation Design Project in Kratie and Kampong Cham, Cambodia, used geocoordinated digital design for the development of a new substation.  The decision to use geocordinated design technology for this project was partially motivated by the requirement that the company would not only be responsible for designing and building the substation but also for operating it for a period of 25 years before transferring it to the utility.

Cambodia is a rapidly developing tourism spot and its major cities are also growing rapidly. Electricity pays a key role in this development. A major project initiated in 2015 was a 125km 230 kV transmission line from Kratie to Kampong Cham which required the construction of a new substation. This is in support of the 700MW Sesan Hydro Power Plant which is under Construction in the upper Mekong area. The first stage of the power plant is expected to be commissioned in December 2017 and the power will be transmitted to Phnom Penh, the Capital of Cambodia, through the Kampong Cham Kratie Transmission Line.

PESTECH was awarded its first build, operate and transmit (BOT) project in 2015 by Electrique Du Cambodge (EDC). This project is comprised of two stages.  Stage 1 is to design, procure, construct and commission the transmission line and substation. Stage 2 is  to operate and maintain the line and substattion for 25 years after the first stage which is scheduled for completion in November 2017. This is an important milestone for PESTECH because this is the first project where the company not only builds the facility but is also responsible for operating the power transmission system for a concession period of 25 years. During this period, the company will be accountable for the smooth operation and maintenance of the the power transmission system consistent with prudent utility practices.

The substation design tool integrates both 3D substation design, with 2D electrical protection and control schematics and panel design.  Having everything unified in a single software application gave the entire engineering team a seamless view of the entire project starting with the substation layout, then allowing zooming into the control room and navigating individual panels.  All of the software is geocoordinated (geospatially-enabled) which allows location to be used to index and organize project files, models, and documents.

During design PESTECH realized significant benefits from digitalizing the design process.  These included requiring less than seven working days for schematic drawings each of which normally required 14-21 working days, automatically generating cable schedules which usually required three days to check and document each cable in the project, and component wastage for cables and electrical components reduced by 10-20%.  Substation design which used to require two weeks of conventional CAD work required only three days with the digital tools.  2D and 3D project drawings could be generated as smart PDFs which reduced paper requirements and made it much easier fro drawings to be checked by the the supervising engineer and by the customer.  Overall PESTECH estimated that up to 70% of design time was saved by utilizing geocoordinated 3D digital modeling.

This is still early days since the transmission line and substation are not scheduled to enter operation until December, but significant benefits of the geocordinated 3d modeling approach are expected during the 25 year operate and maintain phase of the project where the 3D models and other information collected during the design and build phase of the project will be reused to help maintain and operate the transmission line and substations.

The presentation by PESTECH International Berhad at YII2017 is available here.

A conceptual design software tool for rail ?

Software tools have become the standard for detailed design. Software has also made significant inroads into many aspects of construction. In contrast conceptual design still relies for the most part on "pencil and back of the envelope". It turns out that creating a successful conceptual design tool is significantly more challenging than detailed design.  Fifteen years ago Sketchup (now Trimble Sketchup) was introduced,  It was the first conceptual design tool, primarily for buildings, that attracted significant interest, but it wasn't enough to keep Google's interest who had acquired the software from the original developers.  In 2012 Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler (now Autodesk Infraworks) was introduced to address concept generation for linear features, primarily roads, but also rail.  Sketchup and Infraworks have attracted adherents, but they have not become the de facto standards that AutoCAD and Revit have become.  Now Bentley has introduced preliminary design design tools for rail and for road.  At the Year in Infrastructure 2017 (YII2017) in Singapore the results of an interesting exercise in conceptual design were reported.  Bentley staged the exercise to demonstrate how successfully their new conceptual design for rail tool is able to address the challenge of conceptual design.

The fastest growing transport mode is rail, which represents over 50 % of all transport projects currently under development. Rail is quite complex because it involves many other systems beyond the track system itself including communications and signaling, tunnel systems, electric power, heating and cooling, ventilation systems, stations, lifts/elevators and escalators, and others. In addition rail systems require efficient pedestrian and road systems to deliver passengers to and from rail stations.

To be successful, a conceptual design tool has to satisfy several requirements which together support what Bentley refers to as "conceptioneering".  Chief among these are that it has to be easy and fast to use, it must be rapid to learn, it must support rapid "optioneering", must be able to enforce design standards or rules, and must be capable of photo-realistically rendering design output. In addition it should be able to incorporate sustainable design, should be flexible enough to accommodate a range of existing conditions, and be able to generate deliverables that provide a foundation for detailed design.

Bentley's conceptual design tool for rail is called OpenRail ConceptStation. To develop some marketing capital among the engineering design community for this tool's ability to address the challenging requirements of conceptual design, Bentley came up with a novel idea. Six teams from well-known construction companies: Arup, BBMV, Costain, Kier Bam JV,Network Rail, and Mott MacDonald were each given two hours of training on the software. Using that training they were then asked to #designinaday a new mass transit system involving both rail and road in a real world community, Oakland, California. Their challenge was to design a mass transit rail system that was environmentally sympathetic, that connected with existing transport networks and community facilities, and included upgrades to existing road and rail infrastructure. Oakland suffers from the malaise that plagues many secondary urban areas in the U.S.: poor connectivity from existing rail and freeway networks to local roads; substantial walking distances from residential areas to local amenities, schools and hospitals; derelict and run-down areas; and high traffic congestion on both highways and local roads.

The winning design was submitted by Jake Sarjant, Serena Gosden, Hiu Chow, and Alicia Winter, who composed the Mott MacDonald team.  The winning team, comprising three civil engineers and one carbon and sustainability specialist, reported that in the context of the one day design competition they had found the software easy and fast to use and that they appreciated its ability to automatically ensure that designs met rule-driven standards.  Overall they found that it was well suited to optioneering and preliminary design processes.  An additional advantage that they found really helped was that it could be easily used with other software, in this case a carbon portal which made it possible to rapidly calculate emissions for alternative scenarios. They did report that hardware with high processing power was essential.

Fully automated classification of road and highway features for autonomous vehicles

Point clouds are fine for visualization to provide context, but to be really useful they need to be classified.  Feature extraction, as the process is often referred to,  is currently a mostly manual process that has been used for many years in the remote sensing sector. A trained person visually inspects the point cloud and graphically selects features which are identified by type of feature, sign, light pole, lane marking, and so on. 

Automated classification of point clouds

Image processing of 3D point clouds has advanced to the point where it has been possible to semi-automate this tedious feature extraction process.  The reliability of the automation process depends on the point density of point cloud, often expressed as points per square meter or per square centimeter.  Point density depends on the technology used to capture the point cloud. Terrestrial lidar, for example, typically captures points at the rate of hundreds of thousands to millions of point per second and is capable of millimeter to centimeter precision. Phodar generates lower point densities and is less precise. Aerial lidar captures many points per second but with less precision because it is covering much greater areas. Single photon lidar is a new technology that can collect 6 million points per second which means that planes can fly quite high, cover very broad areas and still collect 12 - 30 points per square meter.

At the Year in Infrastructure 2017 (YII2017) conference in Singapore, Sharad Oberoi of Sanborn gave an insightful overview of the state of the art for automated feature extraction from combined aerial and mobile scans of highways and adjacent areas.  Different types of laser scanners are appropriate for capturing different types of features. Terrestrial and mobile laser scanners can capture point clouda that are suitable for extracting curbs, gutter drains, traffic signals, road and local terrain information, parking meters, walls, obstructions in the right of way, manholes, sidewalks, overhead clearances, lights, utility wires and connections, garbage cans, benches, fences, guardrails and barriers, retaining walls, and line of sight vegetation obstructions. Aerial lidar will only be able to get gutter drains, road and local terrain information, walls, obstructions in the right of way, and sidewalks with limited ability to get curbs, lights, utility wires and connections, retaining walls, and vegetation.  Lidar does not do well for metal structures such as communications towers and fir these a combination of lidar and phodar is preferred.

Sanborn has developed feature extraction technology that extracts transportation objects from combined aerial and mobile data sets in a semi-automated manner. The mobile and aerial data sets meet the accuracy and information content required for geospatial information for mapping applications as well as the additional information that can be mined for potential asset inventory and infrastructure information content. Mobile technology allows for the low-risk, rapid collection of geospatial information, limiting safety impacts to workers. The aerial LiDAR allows for the rapid collection of elevation information for detailed surface modeling as well as feature extraction. Both technologies collect enormous amounts of point-cloud data that can be merged using the Terrascan capability in Bentley MicroStation. The combined data set is then passed through the automated feature extraction modules to identify transportation objects.  Sanborn feature extraction modules achieve a high proportion of correct feature extraction for road and highway scans.

In the future Sharad expects that it will be possible to improve data collection efficiency by using terrestrial robots or autonomous UAVs equipped with SLAM technology to enable them to operate in GPS-denied areas such as under bridges and in tunnels.  Sanborn has been working with deep learning to improve the automated extraction process.  So far this has yielded mixed results, but Sharad expressed optimism that with AI full automation of the classification process will be achieved.

High precision maps for autonomous vehicles

An application of this technology is high precision maps for the autonomous vehicle market.

Sanborn develops high precision maps for the autonomous vehicle market.  Autonomous vehicles will require high precision maps which contain significantly more detailed information and true-ground-absolute accuracy than current road maps. Sanborn has developed proprietary mapping technology that leverages aerial imagery, aerial lidar data, and mobile lidar data to create standardized, high-precision 3D base-maps focusing specifically on the self-driving vehicle market. These maps include detailed inventories of all stationary physical assets related to roadways such as road lanes, road edges, shoulders, dividers, traffic signals, signage, paint markings, poles, and all other critical data needed for the safe navigation of roadways and intersections by autonomous vehicles.

Major expansion in shareability of project information in construction

One of the challenges to the full expression of collaboration on construction projects is sharing information including geometry, properties, scans in the form of reality meshes, descriptions and status of equipment, and other information. In the dark ages of design information exchange was by paper.  At one time $2 billion of FedEx business was shipping paper drawings between project teams.  The next step was converting paper drawings to PDF files which enabled drawings and other information to be sent electronically rather than relying on FedEx.  But the data in PDF remains opaque to applications such as AutoCAD, Microstation, Revit, Microsoft Excel, and other applications which only know how to read application-specific DWG, DGN, RVT, or XLS files.  iModels are Bentley's way of packaging project information, in the form of application-readable file formats, in a container that can be shared with other project teams. There are iModel plugins for other vendors' products, such as Revit, for example, which enables rich data to be exchanged between Revit and Bentley BIM.

iModel Version 1.0, which is widely used as evidenced by the the number of submissions to the Be Inspired awards that uses it, comprises a collection of files. Each file is accessible to the application that created it, for example, Microstation or Revit, but not to others.

Yesterday in his keynote at the Year in Infrastructure 2017 (YII2017) conference, Greg Bentley, CEO of Bentley, announced iModel 2.0 and this morning Keith Bentley, who is the founder of Bentley, described what  iModel 2.0 is technically. It is no longer a collection of files, but a relational database. This enables all the information to be queried by all applications, not just the one that created the data.

Furthermore, Keith described iModelHub which adds data versioning making iModel 2.0 a versioned database which records changes in the data. iModelHub allows you to compare different versions to see what has changed. This is a powerful capability for construction projects which are constantly changing but which need to enable managers (and lawyers) to know what changed and when.

The is a very important advance which will allow much richer information to be shared by many applications. Additionally, iModelHub enables iModels to be shared via the cloud which dramatically expands accessibility to project information especially when used in conjunction with a collaboration enabler such as Bentley's ProjectWise.

Intriguing new technology developments for improving construction productivity

Throughout media day at the Year in Infrastructure 2017 (YII2017) conference I was on the edge of my chair because there were such tanatalizing hints of spatial technologies that might address major challenges of 21st Century construction. We were inundated with a phenomenal amount of information about new technology developments and by examples of how these developments are actually being used by customers in the real world.  It is breathtaking to experience how rapidly new technology is being developed, rolled out and applied in the real world. This is happening in diverse disciplines as evidenced by the projects nominated for the roughly 20 different domains that are broken out for Be Inspired Awards categories at YII2017.

Today's presentations and the latest press releases absolutely intrigued me and I was tantalized by what I heard. The presentations stimulated many questions about the new technologies that Bentley was developing and I was very relieved to be able to sit down and chat with Francois Valois, Senior Director of Software Development Reality Modeling at Be‎ntley. Real world experience has shown that reality modeling is relevant to every part of the construction lifecycle. As a result reality modeling has grown rapidly in importance at Bentley and now has its own software development group. It joins four other groups which reflect the construction business cycle; design,  analytics, project delivery, and operations.  We chatted about a number of different topics that had been discussed during the day's sessions.

Comparing reality and design

During a highway construction project, estimating how much earth has been cut and filled is critical because it determines for a large part payments to contractors. With laser scanning and UAVs it is now becoming possible to scan an entire project with greater frequency. Converting the scanned point clouds to reality meshes produces a manageable 3D image of the status of the construction project at a given time. Seeing changes from one week to the next, for example, requires a tool that can compare two reality meshes and identify where differences exceed a specified threshold. Depending on the type of project and the 3D scanning technology this could be millimeters or centimeters. Bentley has developed a product called ContectCaptureEdit which allows two reality meshes to be compared. The difference between two reality meshes captured a week apart can be used to compute quantitatively the volumes of cut and fill on a highway or rail construction project in the last week. This approach can also be used to monitor construction progress for buildings and civil projects. Bentley's vision for the future is to enable comparing not only two reality meshes but also a reality mesh and a design model. This would automate the process of detecting divergences from design which is essential for assuring that what is designed is built.

Classification of reality meshes (aka feature extraction)

Feature extraction is a methodology that has been used for many years to identify and classify objects in 2D images captured by remote sensing using cameras on satellites or fixed wing planes and helicopters. In the utility sector, classification is still a manual process with some exceptions. The advent of 3D scanning technologies including lidar and phodar (capturing many photos with a consumer digital camera) makes possible the really differentiating focus at Bentley on classifying 3D objects. 3D classification can provide more information than 2D feature extraction because the extra dimension allows you to determine, for example, the depth of cracks in concrete or the extent of deformation damage to a transformer. Bentley is applying deep learning and other AI technologies provided by the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to enable semi-automated and even completely automated classification of reality meshes. For example, Bentley is working with a partner SiteSEE to automatically classify scans of communications towers captured by UAVs. With a smart UAV and automatic classification, the process of inspecting communications towers could be fully automated, saving a lot of time and increasing reliability by enabling more frequent, less expensive inspections.

Reality modeling for substations

As an example where automated classification is feasible and could provide significant benefits is in creating digital models of existing (brownfield) substations. Currently the process is quite laborious. The substation is scanned using terrestrial lidar or phodar with the option to include lidar or digital cameras on UAVs. The reality mesh generated from the scans is then classified manually – which involves selecting recognizable objects and identifying them as transformers, holding tanks, pumps, buildings, or other types of object. The final step is to link each object to an entry in an asset database – such as Bentley's AssetWise. Bentley refers to this process as “operationeering”. Operationeering makes it possible to use the classified scan plus the linked database – possibly together with augmented reality - to improve operational efficiency. The link between an object's location and the information about the object stored in an asset database esnsures that maintenance staff have immediate access to everything – location and condition - they need to know when there is a problem.  Or it could be used to simply conduct an inspection.

There are tens of thousands of brownfield substations in the U.S. If the classification step could be automated, and if QR codes are pasted to objects in the substation before scanning, the entire process could be semi-automated saving a tremendous amount of tedious and time-consuming effort.

Interoperability

Large construction projects invariably involve CAD, BIM and other types of products from multiple vendors. For example, Revit, Bentley BIM, Tekla, Sketchup, and others may be used on the same project. At YII2017 Bentley announced iModel 2.0 and iModelHub which enable consistent interoperability between different vendors' products. For example, changes made in Revit can be synced as “change sets” through iModelHub to products from other vendors. Bentley developed an iModel for Revit two years ago and iModelHub is a generalization of the concept to other design products. iModelHub is a complementery product for ProjectWise, which is a file based system widely used in construction for sharing project designs and related information.

Connected data environment enabling full lifecycle management

Perhaps the most tantalizing technology concept advanced during Greg Bentley's session was the connected data environment (CDE) which conceptually is intended to enable data to be reused throughout the entire lifecycle, As Francois explained it to me, it is designed to enable roundtripping data between ProjectWise, which is used during design and construction, and AssetWise, which is intended for optimizing asset performance during operations and maintenance. Reusing data collected during design and construction for operations and maintenance remains extremely rare. If CDE provides a foundation for doing this, it could represent a first step in resolving a major challenge hindering full lifecycle data management.

During today's sessions there were many tantalizing hints of the things Bentley is doing to address major business challenges like enhancing project collaboration, automatically classifying 3D scans, and enabling information sharing across the full construction lifecycle. I am anticipating further elucidation about these very exciting developments in the next few days at YII2017.