Between the Poles

P3 drives integrated geospatial + BIM in the Canadian construction industry

Several years ago Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch highway authority, initiated Design, Build, Finance and Maintain (DBFM) highway projects. Private Dutch engineering and construction companies bidding on these projects found that adopting an integrated geospatial + BIM approach on DBFM projects yielded significant benefits. I blogged previously about the firm Royal BAM Group nv / BAM Infraconsult that adopted an integrated BIM + geospatial full-lifecycle approach to construction because many of its projects were DBFM projects. In Canada public–private partnership (P3) have been remarkably successful for building and maintaining infrastructure. At the CanBIM 2018 Regional Session in Vancouver I had a chance to chat with Thomas Strong, Managing Director VDC at EllisDon, who said that at EllisDon integrated BIM + geospatial was considered best practices on full-lifecyle projects including P3 projects in Canada.

Background

McKinsey & Company suggests that the construction industry is ripe for disruption and two of the technologies that it believes will be key in that anticipated transformation are geospatial and BIM. Large construction projects typically take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled and are up to 80 percent over budget. Construction productivity has actually declined in some markets since the 1990s and financial returns for contractors are relatively low and volatile. McKinsey has identified five technologies that it believes will be transformative in the construction industry. Two are geospatial technologies and BIM.  Integrated BIM + geospatial is essential to enable the full capabilities of both technologies.

Geospatial + BIM at EllisDon

Thomas Strong has an interesting background that prepared him for the 3D digital construction world. He started his career in plastic injection molding making steel molds to fabricate plastic parts for cars. In this world engineers use 3D models to fully define to the fabricators what they are going to fabricate. In 2002 he transitioned to the construction industry and found that design business processes were quite different - in the construction industry things don’t get fully defined until they are built. When he joined EllisDon, he got involved with a couple of Frank Gehry projects including the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) where contractors worked from 3D models that were provided by the architect right from the beginning. After that experience, EllisDon started to implement the use of 3D models for design, quantities, and logistics to produce schedules. Now when EllisDon tender work, they use 3D models to define the geometry and the scope of work.

Thomas has been tracking trends in the geospatial + BIM world since joining EllisDon. The use of Laser Scanning is an important new technology driving significant business at EllisDon, who did their first 3D scans in 2003 on the AGO project. EllisDon now routinely conducts scans for deviation analysis, progress tracking and to capture existing conditions related to their core business construction work as well as offering scan-to-BIM as a service. They have developed a leading edge capability for converting LiDAR scans to 3D BIM geometry very quickly and accurately. They use this capability to reverse engineer existing buildings for renovation or heritage projects. The EllisDon VDC group, which was established in 2008 and which Thomas leads, provides consulting services around 3D scanning and developing as-built models.

EllisDon was involved in its first P3 project in Canada fifteen years ago. Since then the P3 business has grown and now P3 is a big part of EllisDon's business.  For P3 projects EllisDon builds a wide variety types of structures including hospitals. In the P3 world the contractor often shares the risk of operating and/or maintaining a facility for an extended period. This means that people who are going to be running and managing a facility need to be involved in designing the facility right from the beginning. It is necessary to cost out the lifecycle of each piece of equipment whether it be a carpet, baseboard or cooling unit because you have to be able to maintain it and at the end of the 30 year period you are expected to turn over a hospital that looks brand new. For this reason P3 projects are very different from design+build projects.

Integrated geospatial+BIM is critical during the operations and maintenance phase of a building. Utilities, transportation, emergency planning, first responder access, energy performance, and evacuation management all require information about internal and external infrastructure. A common geospatial coordinate system enables a comprehensive operational view of all infrastructure including internal and external structures. Thomas explained to me that at EllisDon best practices on full lifecycle projects is to use real world coordinates. He has found that it is sometimes necessary to put a little pressure on architects and others to do because there is predilection among some architects for (0,0) coordinate systems.

It was P3 projects that got EllisDon into full lifecycle projects and led to them developing their own in-house facilities management (FM) group.  As EllisDon's P3 business has grown, their FM has also continued to grow.  Since they are in-house, the FM folks are at the table right from the beginning of a project. EllisDon recognizes the value of the data that is collected over a project lifecyle, and the entire team is aware it's important to deliver the data for the asset in a way that can plug and play in an organized way into the asset management/facilities management platform.

Large public project in U.S. mandates BIM for full-life-cycle construction

One of the largest municipal bond-financed construction projects in the United States has mandated building information modeling (BIM), targetting not only design and construction, but as a permanent record of college assets for use during operations and maintenance.  The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) is the largest community college district in the United States and serves more than 250,000 students annually at nine colleges, spread throughout the greater Los Angeles area. More than 70% of LACCD students are underserved minorities and over 40% of students are over the age of 25.

LACCD has received funding through taxpayer-approved bonds and the State of California to launch its BuildLACCD sustainable building project. BuildLACCD is a $9.5 billion building program is funded mainly by bonds approved by Los Angeles voters in 2001-2016.  The objectives of the project is modernizing and improving campus facilities to enhance opportunities for students from lower-income communities and involved designing and constructing more than 65 new buildings, as well as remodeling many others.  The LACCD consuders itself a leader in environmentally responsible construction. The BuildLACCD Sustainable Building Program is enabling LACCD to not only modernize its colleges but to build more than 40 new structures that will meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards.  LACCD is generating solar power on its campuses and taking other steps to reduce the colleges' carbon footprint. The final phase of the project has mandated a building information modeling (BIM) approach, requiring that each building be modeled in 3D and managed using BIM processes.

I have blogged about the innovative BIM program at LACCD.   About twelve years ago it was decided to capture 3D BIM models of all the buildings on the LACCD  campuses. One of the most important motivations for creating these models was that BIM models would facilitate energy performance analyses of LACCD buildings - which supports the current building program, which targets zero energy usage.  The models include interior power, water, mechanical, and lighting systems together with 2D models of underground infrastructure on the nine LACCD campuses.

There are interesting and unique aspects of how these models were captured.  Perhaps most importantly, the models were created entirely by LACCD students.  Existing structures were laser scanned and BIM models were developed from the point clouds by students. In addition to creating the models themselves this has created a large BIM skilled labour pool in Los Angeles.

The second important aspect of capturing BIM models of college buildings is that to ensure a uniform representation of all the buildings across all of the campuses and interoperability with various applications,  standards should be used wherever possible.  The initial standards adopted include Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), Spatial Data Standards for Facilities, Infrastructure, and (SDSFIE), OMNIClass, and COBIE.  The BIM models were stored in a spatially-enabled relational database using real world coordinates.  Real world coordinates and spatial SQL enabled the models to be easily integrated with geospatial data from a variety of sources. The models could then be used for a variety of purposes including visualization, energy performance modeling, predictive maintenance,  and safety and security simulations.

The final phase of the BuildLACCD project involves more than 500 participants representing nearly a thousand different trades. The plan targets capturing data associated with assets in the planning and design phase so this information can later be utilized by facility directors and campus project directors for maintenance and operations. For the widespread community college with nine campuses this requires a common geospatial coordinate system so that all facilities can be viewed on a map and users can see each building spatially in reference to other facilities including utilities and roads and vegetation. The LACCD database buildings currently houses more than 3 million files totaling five terabytes of data.  The data is stored in Bentley Projectwise which provides a common interface and foundation for a standardized, collaborative BIM approach. ProjectWise is the central repository for all information, including models, drawings, specifications, photographs, and all other project data.

Accelerating the rate of BIM adoption in Canada

There is a general consensus that the development of BIM in Canada lags many other developed countries around the globe. This is partly due to little encouragement from government procurement at the federal and provincial levels and partly due to a fragmented industry effort to push a BIM agenda. I have just spent an exciting day at the Canada BIM Council (CanBIM) Regional Session in Vancouver and had a very illuminating talk with Thomas Strong, President of CanBIM.  I am happy to report that there has been significant progress in accelerating the rate of BIM adoption in Canada by the industry, government and academic sectors.

Background

The Canadian architecture, engineering, construction and owners (AECO) industry represent about $300 billion in capital expenditure, approximately 20% of the Canadian GDP. The construction industry employs over 1.3 million people or 7.5% of total workforce distributed across more than 120 000 enterprises. As in many countries the Canadian architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry suffers from low productivity. To remedy this problem many countries around the globe have prioritized the development of building information modeling (BIM) and related technologies. There is a general consensus that Canada is lagging behind many of these other countries in the adoption and implementation of BIM.

Although a number of private AEC firms in Canada have adopted BIM and are using it on major projects, government procurement with some exceptions does not require or incentivize BIM on public projects. An exception is the the Department of National Defence (DND) which began adopting BIM in a significant way a number of years ago.  However, last year the Department of Public Works and Government Services invited Carleton University School of Business to develop a BIM and energy performance modeling exercise to create an interactive 3D-model of the East Block of Parliament for the purposes of an upcoming rehabilitation project of the building.  The project includes documenting heritage objects.  There are signs that the Federal government is beginning to recognize the potential benefits of BIM for some projects.

Until two or three years ago another hindrance to the development of BIM in Canada was that the industry effort to push BIM adoption was fragmented. Two industry organizations, the Canadian BIM Council and the Institute for BIM in Canada (IBC)/buildingSMART Canada, which work at a national level to encourage BIM adoption, had pursued separate agendas and had not coordinated their efforts to work toward common goals.  The good news is that for over a year now these two organizations have closely coordinated their efforts.

 At the CanBIM Regional conference in Vancouver I had a chance to chat with Thomas Strong, President of the Canada BIM Council (CanBIM) and Managing director of EllisDon’s Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) group. who revealed that there has been significant progress in addressing both of these drags on BIM adoption.

By way of background Thomas told me that CanBIM is a not-for-profit organization founded 10 years ago. It has grown steadily over the past decade and currently has more than 350 members. The membership includes major AECO firms across Canada with good participation on all levels in the industry; owners and residential, commercial, civil construction, architects, engineers, academia, trades and technology providers.

BIM advancement by government

On the government procurement front Thomas told me that BIM requirements have appeared for years in RFPs from Alberta Infrastructure and Infrastructure Ontario, but there has not been a concerted effor to advance BIM as there has been in other countries.  In Quebec the Société québécoise des infrastructures (SQI) has developed an action plan for the progressive and gradual adoption of BIM and related technology.  Since 2016, the SQI has had a rolling deployment plan for BIM that is based on the evolution of the maturity of Québec industry.  Accomplishments to date include

• 2009-2014 - Compile past experience. Submit report in 2014.
• April 2015 - Approval of the business opportunity. International benchmarking study of experience of several international organizations in the field of BIM by l'École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) de Montréal . Development of a deployment scenario.
• May 2016 - Approval of the business case.  Elucidation of costs and benefits. Optimization of the deployment scenario and initiation of deployment.

Planned future developments include

• 3D - Interdisciplinary collaboration using the 3-dimensional model.
• 6D - Use of the model and associated data to simulate and integrate the elements of sustainable development.
• 4D and 5D - 4D:Addition of schedule to the model. Simulation of the virtual construction. 5D Integration of the project cost component.
• 7D - Use all data collected for infrastructure operations.

The University of Alberta completed a review in 2016 of international BIM standards including AEC (UK) BIM Technology Protocol, National BIM Standard- United States, AEC (CAN) BIM Technology Protocol, Singapore BIM Guide, New York City BIM Guidelines, Georgia State Financing and Investment Commission BIM Guide, State of Ohio Building Information Modeling Protocol, and Texas Facilities Commission Professional Architectural/Engineering Guidelines.  Alberta Infrastructure plans to release Digital Project Delivery and Handover Standards on March 31st, 2018. Quebec and Alberta represent the leading edge of planned BIM advancement by top levels of government in Canada.

BIM advancement by industry associations

Secondly, CanBIM is starting to drive integration with other construction organizations across Canada. Since CanBIM is a cross-disciplinary organization representing members from design, engineering, general contractors, and facility management, there are many associations representing those disciplines. BIM tends to touch all of these disciplines. CanBIM wants to work with these industry associations, pull them into what they are doing, participate in what they are doing and drive a consistent methodology and best practices. Thomas revealed that CanBIM has set up a regular communication channel with the Institute for BIM in Canada (IBC)/buildingSMART Canada to ensure that two groups coordinate their efforts toward common goals. 

CanBIM attends IBC/BSC meetings and vice versa. CanBIM and BSC have signed an official MOU as of November 2017 stating CanBIM and BSC will co-brand, work jointly, and share resources, workload and costs to develop and maintain a mutually agreeable set of initiatives; committees, publications, events, standards, practice documents, newsletters, leaving open the possibility to incorporate further mutually agreeable initiatives as needed.  In 2016, CanBIM and IBC/buildingSMART Canada announced that they are bringing together two of their key committees to work hand in hand to further the interests of BIM in Canada. Their Owners and Education Committees will combine their efforts to address the most pressing issues facing the AECO community in Canada so that there is a clear set of outcomes that both agencies can support and endorse in a variety of ways. Furthermore the two organizations launched the joint bSC/CanBIM Canadian Education initiative. The aim of the BIM initiative is to provide a clear scope and sequence of education activities that must be carried out to support and enable the transformation of the Canadian AECO community.  Thomas expressed his hope that over the next few years, CanBIM and IBC/buildingSMART will be tied together in some form. With respect to both government procurement and industry associations this represents significant progress. That CanBIM and IBC/BSM have agreed to cooperate on a BIM education initiative is very good news especially for young Canadians who will require BIM skills in order to participate, not only in the future domestic construction industry, but also in the burgeoning international construction market. 

In summary significant progress has been made in the development of BIM in Canada by industry, government, and academic sectors.  To date BIM has been primarily an industry initiative with industry early adopters implementing BIM for business reasons, primarily, to reduce risk and improve efficiency.  Thomas noted that there have been Public – Private Partnerships (P3s) RFPs for years that have included BIM requirements, but there have not been concerted federal or provincial government efforts to promote BIM at the procurement level until very recently.  That Quebec and Alberta provincial governments have recognized that BIM could help reduce the cost of designing, building and maintaining and operating public infrastructure and have taken concrete steps with respect to BIM represents important progress.  Secondly industry leaders in BIM have coalesced their efforts through Canadian industry BIM organizations and have begun reaching out to other industry associations.  Thirdly, that universities like Carleton University, University of Alberta, and l'École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) de Montréal have gotten involved in the process of helping digitalize construction is also contributing to the acceleration of BIM and digital technology adoption in the construction industry in Canada.

Automating sustainable building design using BIM and energy performance modeling

At the CanBIM Regional Session in Vancouver, Mark Cichy, Associate, Director of Computational Design and Research, at DIALOG, gave a fascinating talk about automating the process of designing sustainable buildings.  Specifically the talk focussed on applying computational design based on BIM and building energy modeling to optimizing building energy performance in the context of sustainable baseline standards such as LEED, AIA 2030, Living Building, and others.  This is important for DIALOG which has just committed to AIA 2030.

The primary motivation for energy performance modeling is currently aggressive building codes that push energy efficiency, for example, customer driven certification such as LEED and other "green" certification, and financial incentives from local governments and power utilities to reduce energy consumption, peak load or both. The EU, US and Japanese governments have already mandated net zero energy, near zero energy and zero emissions for public and other buildings starting as early as 2018.

Computational energy modeling is about optimizing energy usage over the entire lifecycle of the building for multiple objectives.  Currently energy performance modeling typically follows a fairly lengthy process starting with a BIM model of a design.

1. Use Revit to create a BIM model of the building.  The model can be either conceptual or detailed, but there are specific requirements it must satisfy to be useful for energy performance modeling. 
2. Create custom schedules in Revit to provide an information framework for the data that is required as input for the energy performance analysis and for storing the results of the analysis.
3. Generate a gbXML model from Revit.
4. Import the gbXML model into an energy performance modeling software such as IES.
5. Clean-up the model and add external features such as nearby buildings.
6. Run the energy performance analysis.

Mark discussed automating this process using generative design based on parameterized BIM models to optimize energy performance in the context of LEED or AIA 2030 or another sustainability standard.  There are a number of BIM algorithmic design and energy performance tools that can be used to help do this.  Mark mentioned Revit, Dynamo, Grasshopper, Ladybug, and IES. Dynamo extends BIM modeling to include algorithmic design. Grasshopper is an algorithmic design application for Rhino.  Ladybug is a free and open source environmental plugin for Grasshopper to help designers create an environmentally-conscious architectural design.  IES is the industry standard tool for detailed energy performance modeling for compliance purposes.  It is a standalone application that takes input from 3D design tools and assesses the design from the perspective of energy performance.

One of the key challenges that is required to enable automating the sustainable building design process is integrating IES with Revit so that every change in Revit is modeled at the same time in IES.  This requires a tight integration of IES into Revit, something that cannot currently be done with IES, but Mark is optimistic that this will be possible in the future.  The other part is generative design based on a parametric BIM model. 

Mark gave a real world example of optimizing a building with respect to different facade designs, lighting performance, and heating performance.  Pretty amazing - this represents significant progress toward integrating generative design and energy performance modeling that will make it much easier to design sustainable buildings compliant with a standard such as LEED and AIA 2030.

Vancouver's strategy for zero emissions buildings by 2030

New buildings in Vancouver will be zero-emissions or zero-emissions ready by 2030 or earlier. Vancouver will achieve this by a combination of energy usage reporting, incentives to the private sector, regulation including rezoning and building code changes,and increasing public awareness about low carbon building construction and operation.

At a Canadian BIM Council (CanBIM) conference in Vancouver, Brad Badelt, Assistant Director of Sustainability at the City of Vancouver, outlined how Vancouver intends to meet the goals defined in its 2015 renewable city strategy; 100% renewable energy by 2050 and a reduction of 80% in emissions compared to 2007.

Vancouver is already 31% renewable because the electric power used by buildings is almost entirely renewable. Currently building heating relies almost entirely on natural gas. Vancouver has had electric buses for years and municipal rail (Skytrain) is electric. 57% of CO₂ emissions come from heating buildings. Currently almost half of new building floorspace in Vancouver is single family residential.

In 2050 Vancouver's building stock is projected be 30‎% built prior to 2010, 30% current or upcoming, and 40% zero emissions buildings. The more that can be done right now to move toward zero-energy-ready buildings, the less retrofitting will be required to achieve Vancouver's emissions goals.

Vancouver's strategy for achieving all new buildings being zero-emissions-ready by 2030 is multi-faceted.  It includes regulation: to gradually restrict greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, reduce heat loss, and limiting total energy use; city leadership: all new city-owned buildings will be zero emissions; incentives: incentivizing the private sector to move toward zero-emissions building; and capacity building: investing in tools to develop and share knowledge and to remove barriers.  One of the things that Vancouver is doing right now is creating a Zero Emissions Building Centre of Excellence, scheduled to open in May, which is the first in Canada.  BIM and energy performance modeling will have a key role in the drive toward reduced buildings emissions.

In Vancouver's zero emissions strategy the next frontier is embodied carbon - emissions sourced to the materials and energy used in the construction of buildings. Vancouver plans to first require embodied emissions reporting followed eventually by regulation. One thing that is definitely in the works is encouraging the use of a lot more wood in construction. This is partly due to the intention to reduce embodied carbon and partly due to using the excess capacity resulting from U.S. duties on softwood imports.

Open source-based mobile viewer creates value for electric power utilities with multiple GISs

One of the challenges faced by large utilities with multiple GIS, outage management, customer information and other systems, which are often the result of mergers, is how to make spatial and associated data, in different, often incompatible systems, accessible to all users not just GIS professionals.  At Distributech 2018 Duke Energy described an off-the-shelf web-based product based on open source components that is being used by 8000 users, 2000 of them using it 24/7 every day, to access GIS and associated data in several GIS systems, both online and offline, using laptops, tablets and phones.  An important advantage of the the selection process Duke used in selecting the product was that it made it possible for a relative newcomer to compete successfully with the traditional GIS incumbents.

Background

Large investor-owned utilities are often the result of mergers. For example, in 2012 Duke Energy and Progress Energy merged to create the largest U.S. utility with 7.4 million U.S. customers and approximately 52,700 megawatts of electric generating capacity. The challenge for the IT folks is how to manage the many disparate IT systems that such mergers bring together. Historically Duke Energy and Progress Energy have employed all the major GIS systems including Synercom, Intergraph FRAMME, GE Smallworld, ESRI, Intergraph GTechnology, and IBM GFIS. Accessing the valuable operational data in multiple systems is a challenge because each system has its own user interface and command structure. Over the years I have seen a number of solutions that have attempted to address the challenge of providing a common viewer for visualizing data from multiple data sources. But each has had limitations, for example, all data had to be synced to a central Oracle database, or it could only run online making it difficult to deploy to the field, or it had limited support for the many GISs and user files used by utilities, or it supported iOS on handheld devices but not Android, or did not support open standards such as OGC WMS and WFS, or did not support Google Maps, or was so complex users required extensive training and it was like pulling teeth to geth them to use iit.

At Distributech 2018 Ron York, Lead Consultant/ GIS, and Francisco Sarmento, Lead Consultant, both at Duke Energy described how Duke has resolved the problem of a common viewer for several different GIS systems which was brought to a head by the merger of Duke and Progress. They also described the somewhat unusual process by which Duke selected the vendor whose product provided the successful solution.

Open source geospatial components

A key differentiator of the product Duke chose is that it is leverages open source components; PostGIS, GeoServer and Leaflet being the main ones. The product builds on the collective wisdom, code and support provided by the worldwide open source geospatial community.  Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. PostGIS adds spatial capabilities to the PostgreSQL relational database. It extends PostgreSQL so it can store, query, and manipulate spatial data. GeoServer is a web server that allows maps and data in a variety of formats to be served to standard clients such as web browsers and desktop GIS programs. Data is published via Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard interfaces, such as WMS and WFS.  These are all Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) projects.

Multiple GIS support

The product Duke selected supports ESRI ArcGIS, GE Smallworld, Intergraph GTechnology, spatialNET and Google Maps. At Duke it is used to access data in a couple of GISs as well as non-GIS data in Maximo, SAP, three different outage management systems, four or five customer information systems, and can link to CAD drawings and photos and images.  Importantly for engineering users it preserves the original symbology and background maps of the different GIS systems.

Online and offline

Another key advantage of Duke's solution is that it can run equally well offline and online and is able to seamlessly combine and switch between online and offline data.

Mobile and office devices

It supports mobile as well as office devices, running on laptops, tablets and phones running iOS, Android, and Windows. The user interface adapts automatically for each device, displaying map layers, forms and other data in a way that is appropriate for each device.

Synced or direct access to databases

It provides two ways of accessing data; one is to periodically import or sync data into the system's spatial database, which uses PostGIS, and the other is to directly access the data via a web service. It supports ESRI REST Services, which are used by ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise, and the industry standard OGC WMS and WFS web services, which are supported by all major geospatial vendors.

It does not support direct edit of spatial data, but does allow a GIS data correction requests to be routed through Maximo following Duke standard business procedure for making corrections.

It is flexible enough to support different business processes for collecting and organizing data. For example, pole inspections are conducted by circuit in what was Progress service territories and by square area in what was Duke's service territory.

Simplicity of use

Another of the key differentiators of Duke's web-based solution is that it is not targeted on GIS professionals, but on the 95% of people within Duke who can get a lot of value from a really simple Google Maps style interface onto their enterprise data.

Leading up to and during deployment Duke put on road shows, made web demos available online, utilized computer-based-training, and provided job-aid documents to make people aware of the new system.  The tool caught on surprisingly rapidly. Within five months of it being deployed there were 5000 users. Currently there are 8000 users with over 2000 users accessing it 24/7 every day.

Anticipated and unanticipated benefits

The major expected benefit that was realized by the system is that eases the integration of Duke and Progess. All GIS asset data is exposed through a single tool to designers and asset engineers. But there were some unanticipated benefits as well.  It has had a direct impact on tax calculation - it shortened the cycle for internal auditors to complete tax assessments.  It is also widely used during storms and other natural disasters. It enables crews from different area to use a familiar tool to analyze unfamiliar data in areas where they haven't been before.  It is used to provide driving directions for field crews.  Storm managers overlay outages, assets, flood plains, wind, rain, traffic  and other maps for situational assessment.  It allows manager to share staging sites during storms. It has also  proved extremely useful in locating "unmatched outages" - outages called in by first responders with just an address.

Process for choosing a vendor levels playing field for new entrants

Duke used an interesting process to select the vendor. Preliminary vendor interviews were conducted to exclude vendors that clearly didn't have a solution that could meet Duke's needs. Remote web demos provided a cheap and easy way to narrow down the list of vendors. A request for proposal (RFP) process was used to solicit technical-only proposals from product vendors. (Duke was only interested in off-the-shelf products not bespoke solutions.)  Duke picked the top five and asked them to come to Duke for a scripted demonstration. Instead of asking the vendors for a benchmark demonstrating how their product would address Duke's requirements using Duke data, they asked the vendors to demonstrate their product using their own data. They picked the top two vendors and began contract negotiations to decide on one vendor which turned out to be Ubisense MyWorld, a relatively new entrant in the geospatial world.  An important advantage of the selection process Duke used is that it made it possible for a relative newcomer to compete successfully with traditional GIS incumbents.

High resolution satellite imagery helps innovative electric utility optimize vegetation management

Vegetation is a significant source of outages for many utilities. In some regions from one quarter to one half of all outages can be ascribed to vegetation.  Vegetation encroachment initiated the massive North American northeastern outage of 2003.  It is so critical for utility operations that some utilities have a vice president responsible for vegetation management.  It can be costly for utilities to identify areas of high risk vegetation encroachment.  Scheduling and routing crews to prune the trees that require attention is often sub-optimal adding to the cost of vegetation management.  Optimizing these processes can produce significant benefits in the form of fewer outages and reduced costs. At Distributech 2018 Pedro Lemes, and engineer at Energisa (Brazil) described an innovative project which used high resolution satellite imagery to optimize vegetation management. Energisa is the sixth largest Brazilian power utility with 6.6 million customers.

Vegetation is the source of many outages at Energisa and the budget for vegetation management represents a significant proportion of its operating budget.   To reduce the number of outages due to vegetation and the costs of vegetation management, Energisa initiated a project to develop a tool that would allow it to identify and map high risk areas for vegetation encroachment and secondly to optimize routes and crew allocation for tree pruning.  The objective of the project was to decrease the number of outages due to vegetation encroachment, reduce vegetation management costs especially third-party firms hired to identify risk areas for vegetation encroachment, reduce the level of risk associated with vegetation near power lines, and to bring more IT into operations at Energisa.

The project innovated in using satellite imagery together with GIS data to solve the problem of identifying high risk areas for vegetation encroachment in a distribution grid.  By analyzing satellite imagery it was possible to distinguish vegetation from other objects, to differentiate trees from grass and bushes, measure the height of trees, and using GIS data to measure the distance between trees and poles and cables. Energisa contracted with Airbus Pléiades to provide 50-cm resolution, colour, orthorectified as well as near infrared (NIR) imagery. The contract with Airbus specified that all imagery supplied to Energisa had 15% or less clouds.  The imagery enabled identification of vegetation using the RGB and near infrared (NIR) bands.  In addition Pleiades provides high-resolution stereo imagery enabling generating digital surface and terrain models.  Trees heights could be determined by comparing surface and terrain models.    Trees were separated from other vegetation by a minimum height threshold.  Even when there were many trees together, it was possible to separately identify individual trees. NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) was used to differentiate between vegetation and other objects and to distinguish healthy and diseased trees.  Coconut palms were the most challenging because of the lack of a central crown.  Energisa's GIS provided the location of line segments, switches, poles and structures.  Based on the information derived from the two sources it was possible to calculate the distance between trees and cables and identify high risk areas of vegetation encroachment.

The second part of the project involved developing a pruning management system to optimize pruning.  Once the risk areas had been identified, based on the available budget, team locations, the desired level of risk and the cost of pruning a tree, the algorithm was able to determine an optimized route and schedule for pruning operations for each team.  The algorithm was sufficiently robust to be able to be applied to a neighbourhood or an entire city.

Nowadays there is a plethora of satellite imagery with resolution as high as a foot and a frequency of several times a day.  One company is now imaging the entire landmass of the Earth every day. Satellite imagery is becoming increasingly competitive which is lowering the cost of imagery.  Energisa's creative use of satellite imagery and another innovative application that uses satellite-based radar interferometry to detect subsidence, which often can be sourced to a water leak, are two examples demonstrating how satellite imagery can be applied by innovative utilities to improve performance and reduce costs.