Between the Poles: Bentley delivers web-based open source geospatial front-end to leading road and rail asset management system

Geoff Zeiss

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Open Source Geospatial Foundation OSGEO
OSGeo was created to support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software and promote its widespread use
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Sharing information about the location of underground utilities
The U.S. devotes an estimated $10 billion annually to locating underground infrastructure. Every construction project requiring excavation involves significant efforts in locating underground utilities prior to and during construction to reduce the risk of injuries and unexpected project delays. But this information is rarely shared and the location of underground infrastructure is recaptured over and over again. There are successful examples around the world where municipal and regional governments have helped enable a shared underground utility network database.
Growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction
Building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to design-build construction projects for many years. A growing number of countries are mandating BIM for public projects. While the UK government has said that "...we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle", until recently there has not been hard data to support this conjecture. Similarly there has been only anecdotal support for an integrated BIM and geospatial approach for design, build, operate and maintain projects. Now we are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.
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The BIM and geospatial interoperability challenge is the latest symptom of the broader problem of integrating AEC and geospatial workflows, that has contributed to low productivity in the construction sector. After the announcement about a year ago by Jack Dangermond and Andrew Anagnost of a new relationship to build a bridge between Autodesk and ESRI technologies, I thought it a good time to review progress toward interoperability between the AEC and geospatial worlds.
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I thought it would be worth while to include here a talk I gave at GEOGRAPHY 2050 Powering Our Future Planet at Columbia University in New York about the importance of accurate location information about underground infrastructure for the future development of the energy grid. With some notable exceptions accurately recording the location of subsurface infrastructure including oil, gas, electric power and other energy infrastructure is ignored - perhaps this is a case of out-of-sight is indeed out-of-mind. The reality is that knowing the location of underground energy infrastructure is critical for national security, for disaster planning and management, for public safety and for economic efficiency. Everyone is aware of at least one disaster resulting from or exacerbated by not knowing where our energy infrastructure is - the explosions in San Bruno in California (2010) and Belgium (2004) immediately come to mind.
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BIM + geospatial interoperability would avoid another CAD + GIS quagmire
A specific challenge currently facing the AEC and geospatial industries is integrating building information models (BIM) and geospatial infrastructure and building models. There are parallels between what happened in the 1990s in unsuccessfully addressing CAD+GIS interoperability and the current challenge of BIM+geospatial interoperability. But there are also important differences which provide grounds for optimism that the availability of both BIM and geospatial standards, a vibrant open source geospatial community, and a new willingness on the part of major software players in the BIM and geospatial industries will make it possible to successfully address the latest interoperability challenge facing the AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) and geospatial industries.
BVLOS drones improve power line inspections amid increasing fire and storm risks for utilities | Utility Dive
Transmission line inspections for vegetation management and other purposes are essential in ensuring grid reliability and resilience. We saw the devastating effect of vegetation encroachment in the recent California fires, which in part have been blamed on failure to maintain properly cleared transmission lines. With drones that can cover great distances in a single flight and provide detailed and accurate aerial imagery of transmission lines and other infrastructure, it is now possible to almost completely automate this expensive process. Automating transmission line inspections for vegetation management using BVLOS drones not only saves money, but also could improve the resiliency and reliability of the transmission grid.

« British guidelines for BIM targeting 33% savings in TOTEX to become international ISO standards | Main | Initiative to create digital twin linking above- and belowground infrastructure »

June 25, 2018

Bentley delivers web-based open source geospatial front-end to leading road and rail asset management system

I blogged over a year ago about Bentley's support for the open source Cesium 3D globe project. Even so I was surprised to see a Bentley Systems booth at FOSS4GNA is St Louis. Luckily I had a chance to sit down with Pano Voudouris, Product Manager at Bentley Systems, and discovered that Bentley Systems was more involved in open source development than I suspected, specifically, in supporting the MapServer, OpenLayers, and OGR geospatial open source (OSGeo) projects.

Bentley System's AssetWise Lifecycle Information Management solution (ALIM) is an asset management tool for linear and other infrastructure assets that is composed of several different systems that Bentley acquired over the years. One of them is used to manage rail and road assets. More than a decade ago I went to Bristol to see an exceptional asset management system for road and rail assets called Exor, that was built on Oracle's LRS (linear referencing system) which supported dynamic segmentation. In 2010 Bentley Systems acquired Exor and since then has incorporated it into ALIM. Highways England, U.S. state DoTs, MoTs in Canada, and railways in the UK and around the globe use the product. However, it required an ArcGIS desktop, Pano explained, which Bentley felt limited its accessibility. Bentley wanted to broaden the market for their transportation asset management system to the web so that anyone with a browser could manage and view their network and asset information. To do this Bentley developed a web-based geospatial front end based on MapServer, OGR and OpenLayers, all of which are OSGeo open source projects. Pano pointed out that Bentley's involvement with these projects benefits the open source communities around them because Bentley is not only using these open source geospatial libraries, but contributing back to them.

This is further evidence of the penetration of open source geospatial tools and libraries into the commercial space. Since the formation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) in 2006, there has been an annual FOSS4G event that brings together open source geospatial developers, users and supporters from around the world. Last year's event in Boston, USA brought together over 1,100. There are also regional FOSS4G events around the world of which FOSS4GNA is one. Sponsors for this year's event include Redhat, IBM, Boundless, Radiant Solutions (Maxar), Amazon Web Services, Planet, Oracle, and ESRI, which further attests to the penetration of open source geospatial into the commercial market.

By way of background Cesium is an open source JavaScript library for creating 3D globes and 2D maps in a web browser without a plugin. Cesium is free for both commercial and non-commercial use under the Apache 2.0 license. Last year Bentley Systems joined with AGI to form the Cesium Consortium to accelerate Cesium development and support the sustainability of the project.

MapServer is an open source geographic data rendering engine written in C. In addition to allowing users to view and browse geospatial data with a web browser, MapServer supports maps that direct users to content. MapServer was originally developed by the University of Minnesota and is one of the founding projects of the OSGeo foundation. It is supported by a diverse group of organizations that fund enhancements and maintenance, and administered within OSGeo by the MapServer Project Steering Committee made up of developers and other contributors. All source code is openly available via GitHub.

The OGR Simple Features Library is a C++ open source library providing read access for MapServer and other applications to a number of vector file formats including ESRI Shapefiles. OGR is part of the GDAL library which is a translator library for many raster and vector geospatial data formats and which is released under an X/MIT style open source license.

OpenLayers makes it possible to insert a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles, vector data and markers loaded from any source. It is completely free, written in open source JavaScript and released under a BSD open source license.

Posted at 01:00 PM in Geospatial Open Source, Open Source Geospatial, Road Infrastructure, Transportation infrastructure | Permalink

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Between the Poles

Geoff Zeiss

September 2024

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June 25, 2018

Bentley delivers web-based open source geospatial front-end to leading road and rail asset management system

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